[cutety]

Like the other commenter said, if it aligns with their business interest, they will. That said, I do find it funny that essentially the "home" of most open source projects itself isn't open source. I'm not a heavy user of GitHub, as we use a self hosted instance of Gitlab at work, so my only use is browsing projects & throwing up my various side projects on it, so maybe someone can enlighten me on my next question.

Does GitHub have some proprietary tech/functionality that is valuable enough to warrant it being closed source? As far as I can tell, GitHub's most valuable assets are it's large user base and the brand itself, it's actual functionality seems to be pretty standard amongst git hosting applications (Gitlab, Gitea/Gogs, Bitbucket, etc...). However, like I said, I myself am not a heavy user of it, so there could be some feature the others are lacking that GitHub would like to keep the code closed to prevent others from replicating.

[seabrookmx]

I think you're right. The only "secret sauce" I could see them having are some unique operational/architectural features of their back-end code that make sense for an entity at Github's scale. No instance of Gitea/Gitlab is even in the same ballpark wrt repo count and traffic than github.com, obviously.