[rakoo]

Github is far from just a git repository. It's a ticket tracking system, a discussion system, a release binaries host, a CI/CD component and a pastebin. The linux kernel has no CI/CD, no binaries, it doesn't even have a centralized server (only a copy of Linus' tree) and does everything through mailing lists.

[leephillips]

Well, if you want all of those things in one place, then that means github, practically by definition. But the example of the kernel shows that open source can carry on, on a massive scale, with no need for that.

[deepsun]

GitLab also has all of these features, and it had many of them before GitHub, like built-in CI/CD. But for some reason I'm being downvoted for suggesting it on HN, curious why.