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They could have, but I've worked with many ecosystems/platforms/partner programs (AWS, Heroku, GitHub, Asana, Trello, others) and their starting point is that partners need to - and know they'll need to - build a product that's deep enough to succeed on its own. If you need your "partner" just to be in business, it's not a partnership at all. Just because GitHub offers a minimal version of something doesn't mean all others will become "useless just a few month later." It means the partner product will need to be more sophisticated, or provide a better customer experience, or obtain additional distribution/direct access to their customers, or solve some other problem too, or accept a smaller addressable market. Basically, compete. If your statement was true, every AWS product would have made every other competitor "useless." For example, Amazon SES would have obsoleted Sendgrid, Postmark, and many other high-volume email delivery providers. While SES certainly made other vendors adapt, it didn't become impossible to succeed at email delivery. GitHub didn't make it impossible to succeed at dependency security management, either. It would be fair for Gemnasium to say that Gemnasium tried to build a business that depended almost entirely on GitHub for distribution, and that turned out to be a poor risk. That was Gemnasium's choice, though, not GitHub's. |