Stack of the month club
adamloving.com
adamloving.com
As far as I can tell, Bitbucket has unlimited free private repos, the same pull-request and team features, and has been around pretty much as long as GitHub.
What am I missing out on?
I'm not a git expert, but afaik it's easy to setup a project to be visible on both BitBucket and GitHub if need be.
That said I think either choice is great, they are solid and mature implementations of the DVCS paradigm and are miles ahead of older systems like SVN. I use a mix of both personally, hg at work and git/github for personal projects.
I might have a more serious crack at using Github for something personal to get a better idea.
Github is out of the question for most, since there are no free private repos.
I've seen bitbucket recommended on the forums a fair few times because of the free private repos. Meaning students are getting exposure to bitbucket, meaning their market share may slightly tick up.
The understanding you can easily use both.
People like to bitch about git's command-line interface. But most of the quirks have been ironed out over time. What you're left with is a very UNIX-y program. If you understand the concepts then you will figure it out. git also has pretty good Windows support now, thanks to the GitHub client and others.
I don't know much about Github versus BitBucket (or any other site.) I use GitHub because we use it at work and because I found it first. BitBucket now supports git repos, which might make it a contender. I get the feeling that you're more likely to get contributors if you start on GitHub, simply because people are more familiar with the site's interface. But nothing I put on Github has become mega-popular at this point, so I don't know.
Early on git got a lot of traction, and I think this was largely due to github being so, so good.
Since the acquisition, bitbucket has come a long way in a short space of time, and I'm sure they're clawing back some marketshare. Now that they have forking, pull requests and git repos, there's no reason not to use them.
For some reason though, I still find it easier to browse / read / review code on github.
For the same reasons I like watchig interviews where people talk about the technologies they are using at their companies (like webpulp.tv )
The more information out there; the merrier.