From the ‘open source coding’ files:
When I first started aggressively using open source code , freshmeat and sourceforge.net were typically the first places I’d go to look.
In 2006, Google shook up the open source code repository market with Google Code and I started to find great stuff there.
Today, the VAST majority of all open source code that I seek, use and play with is all found on GitHub.
Github was officially founded, five years ago today and the open source code repository world hasn’t been the same since.
“Now, five years later, I’m incredibly proud to be part of a company with 158 team members dedicated to helping our 3.5 million users collaborate across 6 million repositories. It’s been a wild ride and I couldn’t be happier with the amazing community of people who use and love GitHub every day,” GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner (‘mojomobo) wrote in a blog post.
GitHub’s success includes commercial success as well. In 2012, GitHub raised a total of $100 million in venture funding.
Git was created by Linux founder Linus Torvalds in 2005. Until GitHub came along in 2008, Git use was growing but it didn’t have a real mega service. GitHub has become that mega service. When kernel.org had some security troubles in 2011, Linus Torvalds moved his own Linux kernel tree (temporarily to GitHub too).
There is good reason why GitHub dominates in this space. Git as a version control system is vastly superior in a collaborative development model than anything else. With Git (and Github) a wannabe developer like me can fork code and actually really play with code and contribute back in a way that no other system enables.
Thank you Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath and PJ Hyett for having the vision to setup GitHub five year ago – you have made the world of software development a better place.
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.
