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Comment by docgnome | Hacker News Reader

The only thing that could make github more awesome in my eyes would be if it was open source. While a lot of work has gone into gitorious, it seems like they are just playing catchup to some extent with github.

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While the site isn't open-source, they have open-sourced a ton of code. Just to name a few:

http://github.com/github

http://github.com/defunkt/resque

http://github.com/mojombo/jekyll

http://github.com/mojombo/god

http://github.com/mojombo/bert

http://github.com/mojombo/grit

Yep, and they also put together awesome blog posts about how all those pieces tie together: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=895072

I guess I'm a bit of an OSS hippie, but I wish that too. But, having a business model means we can focus all of our time on this. We're able to do more for open source this way.

Also: GitHub has released a bunch of open source (as others have added). One of the other things I like is that details of the architecture are discussed openly. When I joined GitHub a few months ago, I was shocked at how much I already knew about how things worked.

I've thought long and hard about open source and business for a while, and I think you're probably right. I think the best thing going right now for OS is a "pyramid", where all the infrastructure and supporting bits and pieces are open source, and the tip of the pyramid is the differentiator that makes the money. It may rankle some not to get access to that, but by being closed, you can make a lot of money to funnel back into the open source projects you use and support.

If GitHub was open source, we wouldn't be able to make money to hire people to make awesome features. An Open Source GitHub would without a doubt be a much worse experience for everyone.

It would probably look more like Gitorious does.

Gitorious is 8 million time better than rolling your own git hosting, but GitHub is so much more polished. I think a large part of that is because Gitorious is open source, so there's nobody dedicated to it as a full-time job. Whereas you guys have a handful of developers working night and day on creating pure awesome.

You guys rock.

You obviously understand your situation much better than I do, but don't you think that one of Github's big differentiators at this point is the network effect? Sure if you open sourced the whole site someone could put up a clone, but without Github's enormous community it'd be difficult for them to gain any traction.

I think the GitHub folks were misunderstanding me. I'm not saying that "rarrgh! github really is stupid for not being foss!" I'm not even leaning in that direction. I totally understand the business model. The only concern I have is not being able to take my data with me if I leave and you guys recently addressed that to some extent with the new wiki system. I think ya'll do great work.

Thanks!

We do our best to balance features, stability and ubiquity. We consider your data your data, not ours. We've been working on increasing ways to export your data out of GitHub — the new wikis being the latest example — and have a lot of plans on continuing that trend into the future, both through our API and through other efforts.

Much of GitHub already is.

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