[dvorak42]

The academic world in general tends to focus on collaboration with other academics, and people in their research groups, which tends to result in people using their own internal git repo hosting infastructure, rather than external ones like Github, where anyone who wants to commit would have to create and maintain a separate Github account.

Other than having a GUI and nice web interface, what are the advantages of Github over the git repo Mylar is using?

[jessaustin]

I don't know anything about Mylar or the people who created it; I was speaking in more general terms. As an example of what I'm talking about, see Reinhart and Rogoff. Those two rascals would probably beg off of Github because Excel, but that's actually more proof (as if more were needed after their shenanigans) that economics papers shouldn't be written using Excel.

I don't expect other people in the research group to catch all of those types of errors, so a more openly collaborative environment would be an improvement. (I doubt R&R would set up an account for the UMass grad student who caught their error. The attempted replication that took him a month would have been much simpler if he could have git-cloned.) It doesn't have to be Github: Bitbucket would be fine. Even an academics-only or field-focused equivalent would get most of the way there, although it would exclude most interaction with the interested amateur public. Especially for those whose field is computer science, "maintaining" a Github account doesn't seem onerous.

[vittore]

My point is that meteor.js is attracting a lot of attention as does security and encryption, github.com is just natural place to show work done and start dialog. Also remember that notable https://xkcd.com/664/