I started being involved with Open Source in the early 00s. For source code, people typically used CVS or (later) SVN. The repos were hosted by platforms like

I started being involved with Open Source in the early 00s. For source code, people typically used CVS or (later) SVN. The repos were hosted by platforms like SourceForge, berliOS or Savannah, or on the projects' own servers. Releases were tarballs hosted on servers. End users sometimes got software by downloading and compiling those, but there were already package managers and repositories. Before most people had Internet at home, at least in France, you could buy CDs with Linux packages at the press store. Communication between developers typically happened on IRC for casual chat and through mailing lists (hosted with mailman) for serious stuff. Sometimes there were web forums to communicate with users. And conferences, of course. A lot of projects were developed by people who were physically close, for instance people who met at the same Linux Users Group. Some projects used bugtrackers actively, some did not. It was mostly Bugzilla or Trac. That did not really change too much with GitHub. The main difference in my mind is that forking was usually regarded as something bad. You would not fork a project and then send pull requests to fix issues. For a simple fix, you would generate a patch and send it to the project's mailing list, where it would be discussed and eventually checked in by one of the owners. If you wanted to really engage with the project, you would become active in the community and eventually get commit rights. I think what led to that change of model is: cheap branching in Git, GitHub as a platform with users account, and maybe Continuous Integration making it easier to validate patches.