I think the analysis is largely correct. But not entirely. My take on this is that 1) Github fixed the one problem that Git had: terrible UX. Github made it mor

I think the analysis is largely correct. But not entirely. My take on this is that 1) Github fixed the one problem that Git had: terrible UX. Github made it more like subversion. Enough so to consider switching. Indeed a lot of small companies treat it like a central repository with commit rights for everyone. 2) It fixed a big problem OSS projects had: it was very hard to contribute to them. The first reason was why Git became interesting, the second one is why it won. Prior to Github the way to contribute to OSS projects was a protracted process of engaging with very busy people via mailing lists, issue trackers, and what not and jumping through a lot of hoops to get your patches considered, scrutinized, and maybe merged. If you got good at this, you might eventually earn commit privileges against some remote, centralized repository. This actively discouraged committing stuff. OSS was somewhat elitist. Most programmers never contributed a single line of OSS code or even considered doing so. Github changed all that. You could trivially fork any project and start tinkering with it. And then you could contribute your changes back with a simple button push: create pull request. It actively encouraged the notion. And lots of people did. Github enabled a bunch of kids that were into Ruby to rapidly scale a huge OSS community that otherwise would not have existed. That success was later replicated by the Javascript community; which pretty much bootstrapped on Github as well. What did those two communities have in common: young people who were mostly not that sophisticated with their command line tooling. This crowd was never going to be exchanging patches via some mailing list, like the Linux crowd still does today. But they could fork and create pull requests. And they did. Both communities had a wild growth of projects. And some of them got big. Github gave them a platform to share code so they all used it. And the rest is just exponential growth. Github rapidly became the one place to share code. Even projects with their own repositories got forked there. Because it was just easier. A lot of those projects eventually gave up on their own central infrastructure. Accepting contributions via Github was easier. In 2005 Git was new and obscure; very elitist. In 2008 Github popped up. By 2012 it hosted most of the OSS community. Game over by around 2010 I would guestimate. By 2015 even the most conservative shops were either using it or considering it at least.