Well, here's the beauty of Github--if they lose all my repos I just don't care. Since I've got a copy of my repos locally, there's absolutely nothing they can lose... Worse case if they go completely down for a couple days I can still collaborate using ssh or "git send-email".
This is the only reason I decided to use Github after avoiding Sourceforge and their ilk for the past decade and a half.
"This is the only reason I decided to use Github after avoiding Sourceforge and their ilk for the past decade and a half."
But why github? Why not gitorious.org?
If github goes away, I still have my code, but I lose any issues people have filed on the site, and I lose being able to easily check on forks of my projects where people might be doing interesting stuff.
I had been using gitorius.org, but moved to github for all the things other than git that makes one public git host different from another.
Right, and I should probably set up something to auto-snag that stuff where it counts, but having to do that is the sort of thing you have to so for any non-git-based site.
It'd be nice of all those related items were also in a repo, easy to pull.
Well, every resource is locally on some physical machine somewhere. I think his point is that Github is often treated by its users as a "local" resource, in that it takes the place of what would otherwise be a local server running a Git front end or repository.
Now, Github probably wouldn't encourage total reliance on their service. Git is fundamentally distributed, so this doesn't have to be a problem. Still, the Github service is an integral part of many developers' workflow, and I do agree with the above commenter that I'm not sold on the idea of trusting remote servers with integral steps in my workflow.
For open-projects, it's a FANTASTIC platform... no doubt about it.
For a corporate closed project, I honestly would not use github - not because of any feature or lack of them, but because it's a hosted service. I want control over where my code sits, period - if only for the same reason as most hosted services - a subpoena or similar court order can be served against the provider with no notification to the owner of the data. This is the #1 reason one should be careful basing one's business on hosted services.
This is the only reason I decided to use Github after avoiding Sourceforge and their ilk for the past decade and a half.