On Leaving GitHub

Those who know me remember how I used to be in love with GitHub. The idea was genuinely interesting: Git is a decentralised system, which is great, but discovering repositories and projects was hard, and GitHub solved that under the premise – or promise? – of “Social Coding”. But Vito, everyone moved to GitHub, that broke the “decentralised” part! It may have. But Git, per se, is still decentralised; one may maintain copies in multiple places. The option to keep everything in one place was a choice people made freely, for convenience or visibility, and that’s fine. Git was Git. GitHub was GitHub. For a long time, they earned the position. Here’s the shape of what they built: April 2008: GitHub launches. July 2009: 100,000 users. July 2010: 1 million hosted repositories. 60% codebases, 40% Gists. April 2011: 2 million repositories. 33 employees. September 2013: 7 million repositories, 4 million users, 234 employees. March 2015: 21 million repositories, 9 million users, 330 employees.…