My general rule of thumb is that if a product lists its price as "Contact our sales team", then its effectively unavailable to me as an individual. So I guess if we're talking about what exactly the Github "feature" is that MS won't copy, it wouldn't be that there's an enterprise option, but that Gitlab is free and open source and practical for me as an individual to install. Obviously if you pay Microsoft enough money they'll do whatever you want (up to and including I guess buying Github itself as a company from them. Always has been an option, it's just not free to do so.)
Interestingly, this page isn't linked to from https://github.com/enterprise (except in the footer), where the calls to action are to either "start a free trial" or to "contact sales".
Only if you're not logged in. If you're logged in it's not there at all.
Why does this feel like people are trying to turn this into some sort of gotcha? It wasn't even my main point. The point is that GitHub enterprise is not an option for individuals.
While not practical for you, it's not priced out for every single small team or individual user ever. If I recall correctly, there's no minimum seat requirement still. You're changing the position of the goal post on your original comment :).
Original comment from you:
> Actually I take that back, my favorite feature is that I can host my own private instance. Gitlab gets even better if you have admin access to the system. And that's one feature Github will probably take a while to copy, if ever.
Why are people being so pedantic about this? What is going on here?
I never claimed it's "priced out for every single small team or individual user ever". You even quoted it right there:
> my favorite feature is that I can host my own private instance.
I have 33 people on my personal Gitlab instance. It would cost me over $8k per year to run a Github Enterprise instance with that many users and I don't have the kind of money to do that. Until I can do that with Github for $0 then my point stands.
Yeah, enterprise pricing typically works that way. It's designed for businesses, not individuals. Smaller teams pay 3.33 cents a month based on the pricing page that was pointed out to you and individuals can sign up for free. I also find the copy claim to be entirely ironic.
They're both commercial companies chasing dollars. The OSS sales model is simple. Get companies/people hooked on OSS, have them reach the boundaries of the OSS product and then sell them a commercial license. Most people can and will just move to the better enterprise offering which is probably why I see so little GitLab out in the wild. Based on what I'm seeing/hearing from MSFT, GitHub is basically a free product that now comes with your MSFT enterprise agreement. If you agree to spend enough Azure or Visual Studio dollars MSFT agrees to pony up GitHub licenses. GitLab can't compete on that level, and the offering alone isn't compelling enough for your average fortune 500 when it comes to spending money.
My general rule of thumb is that if a product lists its price as "Contact our sales team", then its effectively unavailable to me as an individual. So I guess if we're talking about what exactly the Github "feature" is that MS won't copy, it wouldn't be that there's an enterprise option, but that Gitlab is free and open source and practical for me as an individual to install. Obviously if you pay Microsoft enough money they'll do whatever you want (up to and including I guess buying Github itself as a company from them. Always has been an option, it's just not free to do so.)