this is the thing I've missed the most about development at Facebook. It seems so small, but is a huge productivity boost. Especially if applied to an entire engineering team
We are not sad; we realize this service is not meant for everyone and we understand that we'll receive criticism. In doing so, we hope to better Legit Teams.
We don't view this as a business that's going to make us millions of dollars so much as a product that we'd love for both us and others to use. It solves an issue we were experiencing and, at the least, we'll use our own service proudly.
Your points about competing on other dimensions do make sense, but as you seem to imply yourself, it is hard to find exactly what those other dimensions are. We're searching for this ourselves, but based on feedback we've received from our friends, this is at least a preliminary service that they'd like to use. We plan to iterate from here.
1) We are aware of BitBucket; it's a great service, but it limits us on the number of collaborators we can have, thereby stifling productive group work. As college students, we're always collaborating, be it for assignments or our own side-projects, and BitBucket doesn't make sense for this.
2) Yes, we are college students, and I'm sorry you feel that college students can't be trusted, but I urge you to reconsider this opinion. Its not fair to apply such a generalization to all students.
3) We chose to address the primary service that we ourselves used for private repositories before Legit Teams. We understand that there are a myriad of services available for git hosting, but we are unable to address them all in one post; we limited the scope of the article so we could get our point across succinctly.
4) I think there is a slight misunderstanding here. When we described setting up git hosting, we meant on our own servers and not using a third party hosting platform. These paragraphs were simply laying the groundwork for why we created Legit Teams—they were the context.
5) We are aware of this; they offer a free micro-plan to students and educational institutions. This, however, still limits us to five private repositories. The whole point of Legit Teams is to get rid of limits on repositories and collaboration, which we feel are large pain points when developing with others.