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> They don't give their source away, but they give their service away.

github is not open source - they have a closed source service that is available for free, with limitations. Unless you meant that they are building a business based on an open source piece of software, which is a little different from e.g. Sentry.

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They don't just use an open source piece of software (RoR), they use the open source community to build street cred that they then cash in to score their real customers.

Don't get me wrong: I love GitHub. It's a fantastic product and an inspiration to me. Instead of paying $7/mo for private repos, I choose to give back by gittiping members of the organization:

https://www.gittip.com/on/github/github/

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