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Git avoids the problem where the central service being down gets in the way of local development. Even in Git, that central service going down means degraded collaboration.

Normally a Git remote is just an ssh-accessible machine, and so pretty resilient. But GitHub is a lot more complex, so apparently that simple service went down, along with all the features they built on top of it

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You don't actually need the central service. In an emergency, a team could work entirely over email via diffs like Linus does.

Yeah, true. In this case, I'm sure most teams did what mine did, and waited for the outage to be resolved. The development workflow and CI/CD is so tightly coupled to the Git remote, it would have taken a while to create and switch to another remote.

I once used another alternative: each member of the team runs git-daemon on their desktop to export their local repository, and adds the repositories exported by the other members of the team as git remotes. You can merge a coworker's master branch to your master branch whenever you want to get their changes (and the changes they already merged), which makes for a chaotic but fun development experience.

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