Step 1: invent git. Step 2: have one of the most successful companies benefit from your work Step 3: Get banned by that company because you are an ass
But it's quite obvious they see the responsibility with the project owners first, and will only step in if it escalates. A written policy can make the owner's jobs a bit easier because they can just point at it and deflect criticism to GH.
So is thought-policing your customers.
Personally, I nuked my Github account months ago.
Dueling anecdotes!
because GitHub has been trying to save their reputation after some pretty lousy things went on, leading to them deciding to bend to PC pressure.
I'm all for respecting others, and absolutely against any sort of threats of violence, harassment, etc... It's a massive problem online.
That's a ways from having people flood your project with requests to change things like master/slave terminology or the name of the project because "bro" is horrible.
Citation Needed. I suspect the number of real threats are approximately the same as the number of people that have really fucked my mum.
Plus it's hardly right that you can threaten someone just because "lol it's the internet brah"
Unless we lock down the internet and give up anonymity then it's something we have to accept.
I suspect that Linus's DVCS (as opposed to one of the many other DVCSes with extremely similar data models) succeeded in large part because Linux was an extremely active project, as opposed to because of any inherent technical superiority. I remember the early days of git, when people were using it because that's what you had to do to get Linux's VCS repo; the de-facto requirement to use some wrapper like Cogito was not a point in git's favor.
So, I'm not sure the extent to which GitHub can be fairly said to derive its success from Linus. At best, it derived its success from the network effects around git (as a result of Linux switching to it, and therefore other projects switching to it because they knew Linux and whatever VCS Linux used would be well-supported), and fixing all the things about git that didn't work well. Linus still hates most of what GitHub does that stock git doesn't do! But all of those differences are the reason that GitHub has a very successful company that, seemingly, makes a business out of running a bunch of free tools on a central server.
So yes, without git there would be no gihub as we know it.