05 — Commercialisation
Summary
GitHub's original product was private repositories — a policy the host maintains and charges for, possible because the server can read. On a blind host privacy is the default and costs nothing, so it cannot be the product: a positioning gift, but it forces the revenue onto what a blind host genuinely provides. Four lines: durability and availability (with the warning that ciphertext neither compresses nor deduplicates, so the economics are not a code host's — unmodelled since 14 Aug); namespace and identity (who may publish to acme/ — the one identity question, a write-path product, exactly what registries charge for); discovery and curation across published-key vaults (the only reading feature that exists); and scoped CI, the one key-holding service, defensible only when scoped and said out loud. The fractal changes the market from “who hosts your repos” to “whose hub do you appear in”; escrow of the write key is an enterprise product whose selling point is the operator's inability to read.
Key concepts
- Privacy cannot be the product — the bytes for a public and a private vault are identical — there is no private tier to sell because there is no public tier to downgrade from
- The one identity question — reading needs no identity; who may publish to this namespace is the write-path question, and the answerable one
- Escrow before publishing — a vault whose write key is lost is frozen — readable forever, never updatable; escrow is a precondition, not good practice
Key ideas
- “We cannot sell you privacy, because you already have it” — and the four things sold instead, with the host still unable to read a byte.
- The estate's shape is disclosed to the operator unavoidably; selling it is a choice that would poison the pitch.
- No lock-in by design means retention is earned every year — the artefact is a folder anyone can copy.