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Comment by feelix | Hacker News Reader

Does it strike anyone else as ironic that Linus, the creator of linux, wrote git, which then went on to be used for github... and that it was good enough that Linus decided to use it to host linux on github, and then Microsoft bought it? So now, unless it gets moved, the linux kernel is going to be hosted on Microsoft's platform, even though git itself was created by the creator of linux.

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Linux doesn't use GitHub for anything other than a mirror, and Linus famously hates GitHub.

(More reading: https://www.wired.com/2012/05/torvalds-github/)

Point taken when you say it's only used as a mirror... but he doesn't hate it. He both dislikes it and likes it. This is FTA:

"The hosting of github is excellent," he said. "They've done a good job on that. I think GitHub should be commended enormously for making open source project hosting so easy."

But then he listed a few other things he doesn't like about GitHub, including "the way you can clone a [code repository], make changes on the web, and write total crap commit messages, without GitHub in any way making sure that the end result looks good."

> and that it was good enough that Linus decided to use it to host linux on github

Linux isn't hosted on github, it's hosted on their own cgit instance: https://git.kernel.org/

There was a short period of time, back in 2011, when kernel.org went down for some time (from late August: https://lwn.net/Articles/457142/ to early October: https://lwn.net/Articles/461465/), so Linux was temporarily hosted on github. After that, the repository on github was kept as a mirror of the official kernel.org repository, but it's a one-way flow.

See also the following article: https://lwn.net/Articles/464233/

The official git repo of the kernel is git.kernel.org. The github one is just a mirror and it's just sad that is returned as a first result on Google.

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