I know! It would be horrible to have the service be free, and integrated with Google's other search and social features and therefore more visible to the world!
In all seriousness, I’m happy for them to index my public repositories, but no, I don’t want my email program to show me “relevant” ads based on my private repositories or integrate the contents of my private repositories into their profile of mine.
How would one advertise based on the contents of a repository anyways? Searching for a lot of swearing in the commit messages and recommending anger management?
On a serious note, I would guess that having your commit history and cross referencing it with the issues db (seeing things you closed or breaks caused by your code) might be quite interesting to a recruiter and a source of some pretty targeted (read: expensive) advertising.
[edit: not to mention company lawyers looking to sue some NDA violating employees]
Perhaps you could grep for common libraries like "ffmpeg" and make a guess as to what sort of software it is. Maybe a video editor/player in the case of ffmpeg. Once you figure that out, you could show advertisements for the same sort of software.
I think most of githubs innovations could likely be added to google code without acquiring github. The technology isn't really what makes github special.
Yeah and if they buy github maybe they can integrate social coding features using Google Plus and force hackers to code using their real names. The horror...
site:github.com <terms> is all the integration that I need.
So it's already free, it's already integrated into Google's search, if I want to be social about what I'm coding I can easily share it on G+...
What problems would be solved by doing anything differently?
If Google bought it and nothing changed I'd be happy!!! However, I don't think that'd be the case. Things would change and I suspect for the worse, since it's not a big cash cow like search is.
My favorite response was on Quora where someone asked a similar question and mentioned that "Most GitHubbers wouldn't even pass a Google interview". I certainly wouldn't. And would promptly get myself fired within the week.
Only if you swear at all the interviewers Holman. (jokes :D)
The biggest problem with google acquiring github is that github would be expected to integrate with google's infrastructure; which would be a monumental engineering task. I can't see that happening in any way that wouldn't hurt github somehow. The best case would be that months of github's engineering time is taken away from new features. The worst case is that github is integrated with google code somehow; which would probably result in a revolt by github's users.
I think an acquisition by google would only hurt the open source community. Google likes us too much to risk that.
That's utterly chilling. They'd definitely do another snuff job and then put out a cutesy video about how they're making all this mean old complex stuff quirky and easy and fun.
And if they did acquire GitHub, then I'm sure they'd make all private repos free and create even more of an incentive to use the service. And perhaps the GitHub FE would simply then come bundled with a Google Search Appliance?
