Why GitHub Actually Won (via) GitHub co-founder Scott Chacon shares some thoughts on how GitHub won the open source code hosting market. Shortened to two words: timing, and taste.
There are some interesting numbers in here. I hadn't realized that when GitHub launched in 2008 the term "open source" had only been coined ten years earlier, in 1998. This paper by Dirk Riehle estimates there were 18,000 open source projects in 2008 - Scott points out that today there are over 280 million public repositories on GitHub alone.
Scott's conclusion:
We were there when a new paradigm was being born and we approached the problem of helping people embrace that new paradigm with a developer experience centric approach that nobody else had the capacity for or interest in.
Recent articles
- Initial impressions of Llama 4 - 5th April 2025
- Putting Gemini 2.5 Pro through its paces - 25th March 2025
- New audio models from OpenAI, but how much can we rely on them? - 20th March 2025