[yladiz]

I'm of two minds about this. Part of me agrees with many of the commenters here, in that Not Invented Here syndrome was probably in effect during the development of this. I don't really know Github's specific use case, and I don't know the various open source load balancers outside of Haproxy and Nginx, but I would be surprised if their use case hasn't been seen before and can be handled with the current software (with some modification, pull requests, etc.). On the other hand, I would guess Github would research into all of this, contact knowledgeable people in the business, and explore their options before spending resources on making an entirely new load balancer. Maybe it really is difficult to horizontally scale load balancing, or load balance on "commodity hardware".

That being said, why introduce a new piece of technology without actually releasing it if you're planning to release it, without giving a firm deadline? This isn't a press release, this is a blog post describing the technical details of the load balancer that is apparently already in production and working, so why not release the source when the technology is introduced?