I don’t really see the lose of a convenience mechanism like github as a major threat. One of the inherent benefits of a DVCS is that all the change information exists in every repo. So the disappearance of github would be deeply inconvenient, but not fatal. The members of projects would just regroup and find a new way to share changesets.

The argument you are making seems akin to suggesting that a hammer is scary because someday it might break and then you would have to go back to using a rock to drive nails. The ease of keeping track of my friends, and projects, activity and making minor contributions to open source projects using github would be hard to live without. However, much of the information displayed by github is embedded in the repos. The information that is not in the repos, by and large, provides the most value when utilized in the present, or very near future. (The activity of your social network, for instance.) Those things combined seem to reduce the systemic risks of github’s potential disappearance. Even if it disappeared tomorrow most of the value it provided will have already been internalized into the developer repos of the projects that have used it.

It would be nice, philosophically speaking, to have a more distributed version of the features provided by github. But, honestly, that probably a more effort than it is worth.

Google Code has the ability to ‘star’ a developer or a project and then you can view updates from all your starred developers or projects.

Er, Peter, I’m don’t think what I’m saying is quite as dramatic as you suggest although I get what you mean 🙂

I’m saying “hosted services can go away and github is the first hosting service for code with a significant social networking side to it, thus raising personal investment and the sense of worry about it in general” – I never cared if places like sourceforge disappeared because I knew the code would resurface elsewhere, but how do I recreate that social network that github maintains and displays so well? As you go on to say, this is more philosophical than practical, but then, I wasn’t offering any solutions!

Jeff – I knew you could star projects but didn’t realise you could do the same with developers; I’ll take a look, thanks.

Start your own http://gitorious.org

Now that is an excellent idea, and one that hadn’t occurred to me. I do keep forgetting that gitorious exists – probably because the few times I tried to use it in Jan sometime it was down!

The interesting thing about running your own of course, is that you could have scripts that just mirrored existing repos. A problem still exists for when a centralised, non-personally hosted repo goes away (like github) but at least you have an idea of who you were following and what their code was and thus somewhere to start piecing things back together (in a worst case scenario).

Every couple of years I write some code to pull my Flickr photos, metadata and some stuff from friends/contacts there so I’m not dependent on them (especially since they’re now dependent on Yahoo!) but it’s never very good 🙁

[…] fledged foundation projects, commercial products, or both. So much so that a number of people, like Phil Wilson, worry about what would happen if Github went away. As they should: look at some of the projects […]

[…] As I said this time last year, I dislike the idea of people using a decentralised version control system to centralise their code. […]