GoKawiilBefore 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 making product decisions I dislike. GitHub was part of the social infrastructure of Open Source for a very long time. For many of us, it was not merely where the code lived; it was where a large part of the community lived.
So when I think about GitHub’s decline, I also think about what came before it, and what might come after it. I have written a few times over the years about dependencies, and in particular about the problem of micro dependencies. In my mind, GitHub gave life to that phenomenon. It was something I definitely did not completely support, but it also made Open Source more inclusive. GitHub changed how Open Source feels, and later npm and other systems changed how dependencies feel. Put them together and you get a world in which publishing code is almost frictionless, consuming code is almost frictionless, and the number of projects in the world explodes.
That has many upsides. But it is worth remembering that Open Source did not always work this way.
A Smaller World
Before GitHub, Open Source was a much smaller world. Not necessarily in the number of people who cared about it, but in the number of projects most of us could realistically depend on.
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