[autoreleasepool]

> losing that hub would be an absolute disaster.

Not really. I agree GitHub is a great for open source, but its not essential. It would be a shame to lose the community, central location, user activity history, etc... but actively maintained projects would not suffer much.

The recovery process would be as simple as pushing to a new remote and emailing the core developers. It would probably take a few months to properly set up a JIRA or other bug tracker and for everyone to settle into the new work flow.

The genius of git (or should I say BitKeeper) is that its distributed, so having a hub isn't really important.

[danneu]

    > The recovery process would be as simple

You're only thinking of the most trivial part of the migration: the immediate technical one.

It's like suggesting that it's not so bad if a massive forum shuts down by pointing out how easy it is to install phpbb and run an import script.

[autoreleasepool]

> You're only thinking of the most trivial part of the migration: the immediate technical one.

That's a straw man. I said it would take a few months to resolve the logistical issues surrounding migration.

Instead of caricaturing my thought process, could you please specify some of the "disastrious" difficulties you and the GP are concerned about?

[jacquesm]

You entirely fail to appreciate the word 'community'. That's fine with me, I don't care one way or another whether I can convince you that losing github would be a disaster for open source but just for a minute consider why all these open source projects that were formerly hosted in different places migrate to github. The community has achieved critical mass and that is what drives this, the technology is entirely secondary to that.

If you lose github you lose the community and a user / contributer to say 'apache spark' will not automatically be a user / contributor of all the other open source projects hosted on github. Single sign on for contribution to any open source project and a consistent user interface are also big pluses (but those are technical), and would be hard to achieve as well.

So in my opinion github (and several other services) are now really too big to fail.

[autoreleasepool]

Thank you for the substantive reply. I love github and I do appreciate the macro level of community it provides. If no other community platform sprung up it's demise would certainly be a regression for open source. In that sense, I agree with what your saying.

The last line is where we fundamentally disagree, but that's ok. I think open source would be able to recover from the death of github without much long-term difficulty. It would be a painful transition, like all transitions, but I don't think it would be an overwhelming problem or disaster. Maybe I'm just optimistic.

[jacquesm]

Let's hope we won't find out and that if we do find out that you're right and I'm wrong.

[gkya]

The "community" model of github is like that of an online strategy game, it's based on bragging about numbers. Stars, commits, followers. It is the illness that all modern things have... So, while I hold that a demise of Github would have a huge impact on the community, I am not holding that such impact would end up bad for it. In fact, if the communities switched away from such technology, it'd be better for the open source. We'd focus better on developing our projects and wouldn't be distracted by the stargazing etc.

[jacquesm]

> The "community" model of github is like that of an online strategy game, it's based on bragging about numbers. Stars, commits, followers.

I don't care about any of those things and I think that that goes for the majority of contributors to github open source projects. What does matter is the number of contributors to a project and how involved they are, that's a useful metric.