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Comment by phicoh | Hacker News Reader

"With this new set of powers, we saw a Cambrian explosion of open source that coincided with git's adoption. [...] That's where GitHub stepped in, providing elegant, centralized solutions around all of these new problems."

Did the author live in a parallel universe? There was an insane number of small open source projects way before git was created. And there was a clear place where to find them: SourceForge.

The cool things about git are the ability to sync repos and the ability to handle merging branches way better than SVN.

Everything else we had. Sourceforge dropped the ball and that allowed github to take its place.

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Haha, no I was in this universe, and am old enough to have participated in that era as well ;)

I think it's pretty clear, though, that both the quantity and quality of open source software has increased drastically in the last decade or so. I think it's fair to say I may have stretched the degree of causation git had, as opposed to just correlation. But I also think it's pretty evident git, as a tool, had something to do with it.

(Of course this anecdotal) I see no correlation which source code control software.

What I think is key for open source is the quality of internet access we have these days. You can copy any repo without really thinking about it.

The other aspect is that open source is extremely mainstream. Mobile is still a reflection of the old world where everybody tries to make a small amount of money which some closed source apps.

Lots of people realize that is it is better to collaborate with other people in an open source project then to be on your own writing your own programs.

All of that would work just as well on SVN.

I am old enough to have participated in the pre-SF days, and can say that "the quantity and quality of open source software [...] increased drastically" with SF.

Ditto with Python.

Ditto with pretty much everything computer related.

It's as if the extensive shift in education starting in the 1980s or so, to emphasize training with computers and programming, has lead to a large number of well-trained, competent programmers.

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