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reading that makes me wonder how open source projects existed at all before GitHub... GitHub exposes the once private forks that people had lying around on the

• adamrg 15y ago
  (as author of original post) Agreed. But GitHub did a lot more than just that - across the board it removed the barriers to collaboration (I used to run a few projects on SourceForge, and contribute to others; the ease of GitHub was like a breath of fresh air). It got people excited and feeling free and able to collaborate. ...and so (I suspect) we're today less tolerant of unexpected barriers to collaboration. GitHub gets you hooked, then makes it extremely difficult to manage the "handover" part of a project (something that SF - for all its failings - handled pretty well). The projects that die this way may well never have existed without GitHub in the first place - but that's not an excuse to just kill them off under a burden of maintenance crud.
  • hunvreus 15y ago
    I think your post fail to recognize a few things. I am not going to point out the various other argument, however I think you'd need to acknowledge the fact that first, there are much more people contributing to OSS nowadays than during the "SF's days". Moreover, with the acceleration of online collaboration in all its forms, we are overwhelmed with new trends that are sometimes hard to interpret. I genuinely believe that these trends tend to self-regulate themselves over time and that users, in the end, learn to better leverage the tools they are introduced to.