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Comment by sfk | Hacker News Reader

Could someone explain why "being on Github" is synonymous with "contributing to open source" in some circles?

The Github projects are a very small part of the open source universe. You can easily build *BSD or LinuxFromScratch with a substantial userland without ever downloading anything from Github.

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Speaking frankly, even on our slowest days, the number of open source commits being pushed to GitHub dwarfs other sites [1]. That's not to say OS development isn't happening elsewhere, but there happens to be a lot of it going on in one particular place these days.

To your second point, you're right. I'd love to be able to convince older OS projects to move to GitHub. Some do[2], but it's an uphill battle.

1. https://github.com/blog/802-still-committing-like-crazy

2. https://github.com/bagder/curl

We're predominantly web developers. A large portion of open source activity in the web development world happens on Github.

That and I'm certain jresig wasn't limiting his sentiment to Github. Just using it as an example

Apparently, because Github offers a simple API that lets Careers integrate with it. I'd wager that a SourceForge link is next on the feature list.

I think one answer to your question is "visibility". When you go to a Github project page, you're greeted with standard fork/download/commit links. But you're also one or two clicks away from viewing actual source inline.

Yes, other websites show source inline, but I've found that they are not intuitive at all, and the code (to me) feels hidden.

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