How GitHub Conquered Google, Microsoft, and Everyone Else

Chris DiBona was worried everything would end up in one place.

This was a decade ago, before the idea of open source software flipped the tech world upside-down. The open source Linux operating system was already running an enormous number of machines on Wall Street and beyond, proving you can generate big valueand big moneyby freely sharing software code with the world at large. But the open source community was still relatively small. When coders started new open source projects, they typically did so on a rather geeky and sometimes unreliable internet site called SourceForge.

DiBona, the long-haired open source guru inside Google, was worried that all of the worlds open source software would end up in that one basket. There was only one, and that was SourceForge, he says.

So, like many other companies, Google created its own site where people could host open source projects. It was called Google Code. The company had built its online empire on top of Linux and other open source software, and in providing an alternative to SourceForce, it was trying to ensure open source would continue to evolve, trying to spread this religion across the net.

But then GitHub came along and spread it faster.

Today, Google announced that after ten years, its shutting down Google Code. The decision wasnt hard to predict. Over the past three years or so, the company has moved about a thousand projects off of the site. But its official demise is worth noting. Google Code is dying because most of the open source worlda vast swath of the tech world in generalnow houses its code on GitHub, a site bootstrapped by a quirky San Francisco startup of the same name. All but a few of those thousand projects are now on GitHub.

Some argue that Google had other, more selfish reasons for creating Google Code: It wanted control, or it was working to get as much digital data onto its machines as it could (as the company is wont to do). But ultimately, GitHub was more valuable than any of that. GitHub democratized software development in a more complete way than SourceForge or Google Code or any other service that came before. And thats the most valuable currency in the software development world.

After just seven years on the net, GitHub now boasts almost 9 million registered users. Each month, about 20 million others visit without registering. According to web traffic monitor Alexa, GitHub is now among the top 100 most popular sites on earth.

Its popularity is remarkable for a site thats typically used by software coders, not people looking for celebrity news, cat videos, or social chatter. If you look at the top 100 sites, says Brian Doll, GitHubs vice president of strategy, youve got a handful of social sites, thirty flavors of Google with national footprints, a lot of media outletsand GitHub.

The irony of GitHubs success, however, is the open source world has returned to a central repository for all its free code. But this time, DiBonalike most other codersis rather pleased that everything is in one place. Having one central location allows people to collaborate more easily on, well, almost anything. And because of the unique way GitHub is designed, the eggs-in-the-same-basket issue isnt as pressing as it was with SourceForge. GitHub matters a lot, but its not like youre stuck there, DiBona says.

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How GitHub Conquered Google, Microsoft, and Everyone Else