Info About Github

At the heart of GitHub is Git, an open source project started by Linux creator Linus Torvalds.
Matthew McCullough, a trainer at GitHub, explains that Git, like other version control systems,
manages and stores revisions of projects. Although it’s mostly used for code, McCullough says Git
could be used to manage any other type of file, such as Word documents or Final Cut projects. Think
of it as a filing system for every draft of a document.
Some of Git’s predecessors, such as CVS and Subversion, have a central “repository” of all the files
associated with a project. McCullough explains that when a developer makes changes, those
changes are made directly to the central repository. With distributed version control systems like
Git, if you want to make a change to a project you copy the whole repository to your own system.
You make your changes on your local copy, then you “check in” the changes to the central server.
McCullough says this encourages the sharing of more granular changes since you don’t have to
connect to the server every time you make a change.
GitHub is a Git repository hosting service, but it adds many of its own features. While Git is a
command line tool, GitHub provides a Web-based graphical interface. It also provides access control
and several collaboration features, such as a wikis and basic task management tools for every
project.
The flagship functionality of GitHub is “forking” – copying a repository from one user’s account to
another. This enables you to take a project that you don’t have write access to and modify it under
your own account. If you make changes you’d like to share, you can send a notification called a “pull
request” to the original owner. That user can then, with a click of a button, merge the changes found
in your repo with the original repo.
These three features – fork, pull request and merge – are what make GitHub so powerful. Gregg
Pollack of Code School (which just launched a class called TryGit) explains that before GitHub, if you
wanted to contribute to an open source project you had to manually download the project’s source
code, make your changes locally, create a list of changes called a “patch” and then e-mail the patch
to the project’s maintainer. The maintainer would then have to evaluate this patch, possibly sent by
a total stranger, and decide whether to merge the changes.
This is where the network effect starts to play a role in GitHub, Pollack explains. When you submit a
pull request, the project’s maintainer can see your profile, which includes all of your contributions
on GitHub. If your patch is accepted, you get credit on the original site, and it shows up in your
profile. It’s like a resume that helps the maintainer determine your reputation. The more people and
projects on GitHub, the better idea picture a project maintainer can get of potential contributors.
Patches can also be publicly discussed.
Even for maintainers who don’t end up using the GitHub interface, GitHub can make contribution
management easier. “I end up just downloading the patch anyway, or merging from the command
line instead of from the merge button,” says Isaac Schlueter, the maintainer of the open source
development platform Node.js. “But GitHub provides a centralized place where people can discuss
the patch.”
Lowering the barrier to entry democratizes open source development, and helps young projects
grow. “Node.js wouldn’t be what it is today without GitHub,” Schlueter says.
Besides its public facing open source repositories, GitHub also sells private repositories and on-
premise instances of its software for enterprises. These solutions obviously can’t take full advantage
of GitHub’s network effect, but they can take advantage of the collaboration features. That’s how
GitHub makes money, but it’s not alone in this market.
Atlassian acquired a competitor called BitBucket in 2010. And earlier this year Atlassian launched
Stash, a product that enables you to host private, on-premise Git repositories with
BitBucket/GitHub-style collaboration features. The company also sells developer collaboration tools
like the bug tracker Jira and the wiki Confluence. Competition from Atlassian, which took $60 million
in funding from Accel Partners in 2010, could help explain why GitHub took this round of funding,
and hint at some possible future directions for the company. For example, Schlueter says GitHub’s
issue tracking feature could eventually compete with JIRA for some projects.
The money may be in private and on-premise hosting, but the love is in the public repositories.
Perhaps most importantly, GitHub has become the Library of Alexandria for code examples. Since Git
encourages granular recording of changes, programmers, be they absolute beginners or experts, can
trace the steps of some of the greatest developers in the world and find out how they solved thorny
problems. But if GitHub were ever to meet the same fate as the Library of Alexandria, it could be
reconstructed from all those local forks distributed on so many developers laptops all over the
world. Regardless of how this investment works out, that’s a hell of a legacy for the GitHub team to
leave behind.

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At the heart of GitHub is Git, an open source project started by Linux creator Linus Torvalds.

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