I come relatively late to the subject of Remote Development Environments (also known as Cloud Development Environments). The main reason is that I haven’t worked in a development team for over six years. However, I’m now working for Loft Labs, and we have a RDE product: DevPod. I wanted to understand our value proposition as I’ll be at FOSDEM operating the DevPod booth.

Since its inception, the attitude of GitHub toward repositories was to allow unlimited public repositories, while make private ones paying. Whether it’s a consequence of Microsoft’s acquisition or not, this stance changed recently: GitHub announced private repositories were also made free, for up to 3 contributors. There was a lot of celebration on the Web, but not from my side. This move looks more like a (desperate?) move to keep developers on GitHub.

As a developer, you’re a pretty important resources for service providers. Without developers, service providers cannot make savings based on scale. Having developers also means higher chances of someone having a killer idea on top of your service, creating even more value. And developers attract more developers. In order to achieve that, service providers offer free services. In the Cloud realm, both Google and Amazon have a packaged offer valid for a year.

The cloud is here to stay. When Google made Java available for its App Engine PaaS platform, I was there and I tried it. Last week, VMWare launched its competitor, the CloudFoundry platform, and I wanted to try it the same way. Since then, I’ve played a little with it and it’s full of good surprises compared to Google App Engine.