You're reading a lot into one assumption you've made. I'm a grad student. I try out lots of little things. I want to keep them, but I don't want them just on my hard drive (I like them to be available on the Internets).
GitHub forces me to open-source those small projects, and I'm usually fine with this, but lots of other people aren't. And if he can offer it for $9, then why shouldn't he? Your complaint is that his potential customers should pay more, because you think GitHub has better features, which he may or may not need. That doesn't make any sense. Having different offers and different price points makes sense, so I really don't see why you are knocking the OP for making something that fits his (and presumably others) needs.
I don't see the parallel. Quite the opposite; he's displeased with what he sees as GitHub's high price for their lowest-tier paid account, and developed an alternative that costs less and offers more of the "bare bones" stuff (more space, unlimited private repos) instead of focusing on the higher-level collaboration tools and web interfaces.
How does a reference to someone finding little friction to paying multiple tens to hundreds of dollars for things while cringing at a 99-cent expenditure have anything to do with this?
GitHub bothers me, to be honest. I read a lot lately about how many people are using GitHub as a sort of "programmer's portfolio", and, more importantly, how many startups are asking for your GitHub URL as a part of your resume package. As if how many active repos on GitHub you have is some sort of even remotely useful metric as to how good a programmer you are. There's a lot of pressure to have a strong presence on GitHub, while their product offering doesn't seem to meet the needs of a lot of people. Not to mention there's tons of talent that uses hg or bzr as their VCS of choice; nobody asks for your bitbucket or launchpad URL.
"[...] he's displeased with what he sees as GitHub's high price for their lowest-tier paid account [...]"
And I'm arguing that his displeasure with GitHub's price comes from the fact that he's underestimating the extra amount of time he will have to spend as a user of CodePlane because CodePlane is not remotely as polished as GitHub. I'm arguing that this extra amount of time will not be worth the difference in price.
"[...] developed an alternative that costs less and offers more of the "bare bones" stuff (more space, unlimited private repos) instead of focusing on the higher-level collaboration tools and web interfaces. [...]"
It's not just collaboration and web stuff, it's reliability and security. Would you seriously trust a tiny service like CodePlane to store your code? Both ensuring it won't be deleted and that it won't be hacked into? If DropBox has trouble with those issues, would you trust a low-budget one-man-operation with your 50 repos?
"[...] There's a lot of pressure to have a strong presence on GitHub [...]"
When people evaluate programmers they often have to rely on far-from-perfect metrics, like university credentials. Putting emphasis on GitHub and ignoring the other forges is not ideal, but it's such a big improvement over the old ways. It's hard to get new metrics accepted into the mainstream.
And I'm arguing that his displeasure with GitHub's price comes from the fact that he's underestimating the extra amount of time he will have to spend as a user of CodePlane because CodePlane is not remotely as polished as GitHub. I'm arguing that this extra amount of time will not be worth the difference in price.
Yes, I get that. I just don't agree, and presumably he doesn't either.
It's not just collaboration and web stuff, it's reliability and security. Would you seriously trust a tiny service like CodePlane to store your code? Both ensuring it won't be deleted and that it won't be hacked into? If DropBox has trouble with those issues, would you trust a low-budget one-man-operation with your 50 repos?
And GitHub started as... what, exactly? A tiny low-budget one-man operation? Everybody's gotta start somewhere. Maybe CodePlane doesn't meet your reliability and security requirements today, but there's nothing saying it won't in 3-6 months.
And regardless, this is Git we're talking about. Every repository clone is a full backup. If you're still concerned, add a post-commit hook that also pushes to another server you control, or set up a cron job that does rsync every now and then. I'd do the exact same thing on GitHub as well -- why would you trust GitHub to never have an issue that might render their backups useless? It's certainly not the first time this has happened to a service that does their own backups. If there's data you really care about, you must maintain your own backups. At the very least use an online backup solution (or something like Dropbox). Maybe not something you control, but at least it's pretty unlikely that both services would fail at the same time.
When people evaluate programmers they often have to rely on far-from-perfect metrics, like university credentials. Putting emphasis on GitHub and ignoring the other forges is not ideal, but it's such a big improvement over the old ways. It's hard to get new metrics accepted into the mainstream.
Yeah, that's true. That was more of a mini-rant on my part than an endorsement of anything non-GitHub.
I'm curious about the OP's logic. I believe I found a hole in it and I'm curious whether I have made a mistake or he did, and I'll be happy if he'll point out my mistake if I have one.
GitHub forces me to open-source those small projects, and I'm usually fine with this, but lots of other people aren't. And if he can offer it for $9, then why shouldn't he? Your complaint is that his potential customers should pay more, because you think GitHub has better features, which he may or may not need. That doesn't make any sense. Having different offers and different price points makes sense, so I really don't see why you are knocking the OP for making something that fits his (and presumably others) needs.