$100 Million Reasons why Open Source Git (and GithHub) is the greatest thing since sliced bread

From the ‘Sourceforge and Google Code?’ files:

Today for nearly anyone starting a new open source project, the default choice for code repository/dev is GitHub.

Companies big and small, developers known (like Linus Torvalds) and even wannabe (like me) all use GitHub. It has eclipsed Google Code and Sourceforge and without any doubt in my mind, it is the best way to build community too, from the code level up.

While there are tens of thousands of people that don’t pay a dime to use GitHub, there are lots of companies that do. So many in fact that GitHub has now just raised $100 Million in venture capital funding.

That’s a lot of money.

VCs don’t invest based on what the company is worth today, they invest based on what they think it will be worth tomorrow and how much they expect to make in an exit strategy. So GitHub – a site built around Git – the open source version control system built over a short period of time by Linus Torvalds – is likely a what…$500 million business? Maybe it’s a $1 billion business?

It is truly staggering to consider that in just a few short years, Git and GitHub have displaced legacy version control systems in terms of both mind share and now dollars too.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.