I’m not that keen on git (for mostly aesthetic reasons although I suspect I’ll have to get over this soon), and github makes me jump through a couple of hoops too many to get up and running for the first time, but those aren’t things that worry me.
I’m worried about github going away.
Specifically I’m worried about it going away because so many people I actually know use it. Of course, github reminds me of this every time I log in because the social network features that allow you to follow people, as well as projects, has a constantly updating stream of their activity; something that, as far as I know, Sourceforge and Google Code have never allowed you to do. For me, this changes the dynamic of a hosted version control system quite drastically, because you’re suddenly being shown, very clearly, all the changes your friends are making, and how much they’re investing in this system.
What I really want to know is – where else are they hosting their code? I mean, this is the kind of thing a distributed version control system makes easy, right? But as far as I know, none of these people are hosting their code themselves so that if github went away I’d have no way of keeping track of what’s going on nor of accessing their code at all.
This kind of thing never seemed like an obvious concern on the centralised code-hosting services, and if it was then it was localised to “me and the projects I’m interested in”. By spreading that more obviously to my network it seems like a much more important problem.