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Speaking as someone who, per my other comments in this thread, also dislikes how GitHub is a dominant proprietary platform in an open source community - I have

Speaking as someone who, per my other comments in this thread, also dislikes how GitHub is a dominant proprietary platform in an open source community - I have no choice but to agree with you. I remember SourceForge. It was the best we had, but it sucked! There was a days-to-weeks long approval process for new projects, advertising everywhere, and a ridiculously unintuitive UI. And SourceForge was basically the best option as far as finding free hosting for generic open source projects. GitHub on the other hand is beautifully simple and easy to get started with, and I generally quite like working with it.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
> I remember SourceForge. It was the best we had, but it sucked! There was a days-to-weeks long approval process for new projects, advertising everywhere, and a ridiculously unintuitive UI. And SourceForge was basically the best option as far as finding free hosting for generic open source projects. But then again, so was CVS for version control even further in the past. The question is: How much of that is simply technological progress that would have happened anyway, but possibly without the centralization, and how much of this is actually genuine contribution on the part of github? Simply comparing what github is now to what the alternatives were like a decade ago is not really a useful comparison. Of course (pretty much), what is now is technologically better than what was ten years ago. The question is: Is it better than what the alternatives would have been now?