[nadams]

> Who else thinks bitbucket is better than github?

Each service has it's pros/cons. Github charges you for private repositories while bitbucket offers them for free. But with bitbucket you are limited to only 5 collaborators - so it's not really useful for anything but personal repo hosting. I teach classes on occasion (obviously more than 5 students) and I pre-provision repos on my own source code hosting service but I also allow the students to get a free private repo from github (they are free if you say you are using it for a class).

> And that even if its not, we should host a copy of repos on bitbucket too, because competition is good?

It's very unlikely and rare that github would go down or be shutdown but due to google code shutting down I've learned that - it's not a good idea to keep your project (code) in a central location. You can mirror it - but if you aren't running the service yourself be ready to jump ship to either shutdown or changing of features. Github did remove downloads at one point but reintroduced them as releases.

More and more employers are (incorrectly) using github as a CV for developers. So I think github will be the primary source code hosting service for awhile until people realize that a user's github profile is not a proper CV.

[authorityaction]

Bitbucket offers unlimited collaborators if you have a University email address - https://www.atlassian.com/software/views/bitbucket-academic-...

That may be useful for your classes and students.

[nadams]

I didn't know about that - they seem to keep that pretty hidden. In contrast github makes it very visible that they support academics.

In any case - the one benefit of running my own is that not only can I pre-provision the repos but the accounts as well. Getting students to use git is a challenge itself (it can be rather difficult to use if you don't understand the idea behind it - and pushing using SSH can also be difficult if you have never used SSH or keys before) but putting an account they can use/login with in their hands is half the battle.

[timv]

they seem to keep that pretty hidden.

It's explicitly stated on their plans/pricing page, I don't think that really counts as "hidden"

https://bitbucket.org/plans

[nadams]

Compare that to github who has a whole subdomain dedicated to their academic offers:

https://education.github.com/