Before GitHub

GitHub was not the first home of my Open Source software. SourceForge was. Before GitHub, I had my own Trac installation. I had Subversion repositories, tickets, tarballs, and documentation on infrastructure I controlled. Later I moved projects to Bitbucket, back when Bitbucket still felt like a serious alternative place for Open Source projects, especially for people who were not all-in on Git yet. And then, eventually, GitHub became the place, and I moved all of it there. It is hard for me to overstate how important GitHub became in my life. A large part of my Open Source identity formed there. Projects I worked on found users there. People found me there, and I found other people there. Many professional relationships and many friendships started because some repository, issue, pull request, or comment thread made two people aware of each other. That is why I find what is happening to GitHub today so sad and so disappointing. I do not look at it as just the folks at Microsoft…