I think depending upon a single, proprietary web service for everything is foolish. When Github is down, you're out of luck. If Github changes in a way you don't like, you're out of luck.
Jokes aside, using any proprietary web service has the exact same downside. And yet here we all are using Google Apps, Dropbox, GitHub, HipChat, Intercom, and dozens of others. As a team, we found additional web services add exponentially increasing complexity; we eventually needed a platform to keep track of all the platforms we were using. So we back-tracked and went the same route as the Wiredcraft guys, centralizing everything into GitHub.
As a community, instead of advocating turning the clock back (which will never happen: the toothpaste has exited the tube), we should explore ways to satisfy security & reliability concerns while maintaining convenience. Also, you can self-host GitHub.
Erm, I think you're the one who's new here. Proprietary Web services and walled gardens are a recent thing. FTP, email, HTTP, etc. are all open systems.
Of course some companies did try to flog proprietary services and protocols decades ago too, but the users were clued up enough to avoid them and let them die.
Yes, you are correct that using any proprietary web service has the same downsides, which is why I have taken it upon myself to avoid as many of them as possible and support free, decentralized alternatives.
I do use github to host my source code currently, but it would be trivial for me to move to a free service such as gitorious, or a gitlab instance, or my own server running cgit or gitweb.
What do you mean you can self-host GitHub? GitHub is not free software.
Using free software has its downsides as well. Like, bugs all over the place that require you to dig into the source code even just to understand what went wrong. Also, glacier-slow updates, since everyone has a day job.
How many times have you had a game-breaking bug? Why are a good amount of folks still on .NET then? That last point is just hollow. Freedom from what? Oppression?
In an actively maintained project, that bug could be fixed in a day (or at least within the week). In an actively maintained proprietary game, it could go out in a patch pretty quickly. In an abandoned proprietary game, the bug will never be patched. In an abandoned open source game, there's at least a chance you might be able to fix the bug yourself.
And that's one part of the freedom. Open source software will live as long as people are interested in it, while proprietary software dies very definitively.
I agree with what you are saying, but as far as reliability goes github sucks badly and until it gets much much more reliable I think using it for "everything" isn't really viable for most businesses (unless they have enterprise). I might not have any more redundancy with Google Apps, but I am yet to be affected by an outage.
Exactly. The entire reason Git was created is because a proprietary version control platform (BitKeeper) was given too much trust and power over Free Software projects, which it inevitably abused.
The whole point of Git is that you don't have to surrender control. GitHub is just another BitKeeper. If you really want a Web interface there's Gitorious (which has been around longer than GitHub) and GitLab.
The number of Git-backed Wikis, bug trackers, filesystems, etc. is huge too, judging by the New Packages I see in aptitude every few weeks.
Hey, i'm the creator of RhodeCode, we're still open source, the whole core is still GPLv3. It's stated in our header of the enterprise release: https://rhodecode.com/enterprise.
I dont think diversification would do much better. Most big github features are probably handled by separate teams and function somewhat independent of each other as well. But downtime could be a big issue although Github has been generally good at it (https://status.github.com/graphs/past_month) People also rely on github git repos for deployment (e.g. in requirements.txt) so their work would likely survive standard levels of downtime.
GitHub offers and enterprise offering that you can host yourself. It's no better/worse than hosting your own version of JIRA, Confluence, and a git repository. That way you're not 100% dependent on github.com actually being up. As far as changes, you're right, but the changes are true with any product. At my last company, we did a JIRA upgrade which ended up being a nightmare for process because lots of things changed and were configured incorrectly. I guess I'm trying to say that what you're saying is true for any SaaS product you use and doesn't take away from trying to use GitHub, maybe not necessarily github.com, to run everything.
