I find GitHub rather ironic. Git was created in the first place to pick up the pieces after the BitKeeper debacle [1]<p>BitKeeper is/was a proprietary VCS platform, which enticed in developers by providing a free (gratis) version for FOSS projects. Sound familiar? When the "no reverse-engineering" terms were inevitably broken, access was revoked and many Linux kernel developers who'd come to rely on BitKeeper found themselves out of luck.<p>Torvalds et al wrote Git to replace the functionality of BitKeeper. Not only did this give those devs who'd come to rely on DVCS something to use (IIRC, Torvalds himself sent/received patches via email; a workflow which is well supported in Git), but it would ensure that no one entity could have too much control over Linux (and other FOSS) development.<p>Then GitHub came along, a proprietary VCS platform which enticed in developers by providing a free (gratis) version for FOSS projects, and quickly overtook previous alternatives like Gitorious, and became a single entity with too much control over FOSS development.<p>Whilst I admire GitLab's work, since Gitorious went away I'm reluctant to advocate such a single point of control/failure again. I now host my git repos on my own server[2], with a static HTML interface generated by git2html[3] (with a few tweaks [4]). Patches are welcome by email.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitKeeper" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitKeeper</a>
[2] <a href="http://chriswarbo.net/git" rel="nofollow">http://chriswarbo.net/git</a>
[3] <a href="http://hssl.cs.jhu.edu/~neal/git2html/" rel="nofollow">http://hssl.cs.jhu.edu/~neal/git2html/</a>
[4] <a href="http://chriswarbo.net/git/git2html/" rel="nofollow">http://chriswarbo.net/git/git2html/</a>