Maybe, but GitHub's pricing model encourages sharing, and that's a good thing. Think of how many repositories might've been private and not benefited thousands of people.

Granted, the prices might be steep/strange, but I see no problem in charging for things that people don't want to share on a social code sharing site.

How much sharing actually goes on? (And just because somebody impulse clones a repo doesn't actually mean there's meaningful sharing going on.)

Sharing doesn't necessarily mean someone cloning or contributing to your project. I find github useful because it lets me read other people's code both for evaluating potential co-workers and getting better at my craft.

I've learned a lot from reading other people's code and I still think it's one of the best ways to learn new languages and techniques.

Even with some of my more obscure projects on Github (like a ZNC module that sends IRC notifications to my phone via Notifo) have garnered some observers, forks, and pull requests with features or improvements that I probably never would have gotten if it had either been on my own repo hosting.

Well, anyone GitHub's pricing model has driven over to Assembla isn't sharing.

I just made the same tradeoff yesterday.

I'd love to use Github and all, Github's cool. But I can't justify paying that much for private repositories. Even with all of the annoying junk on the site, Assembla's free plan won hands down.

The crucial difference is that in the case of github, their business is github.

In the case of Assembla, their business is consulting and the site is a loss leader for that division.

This quite effectively explains both the pricing and feature set differences.

Isn't there some value in paying for a service that you use and value?