Beautiful Pixel

I usually don’t blog about stuff that everyone else is obviously blogging about already. But I am making an exception, just this once, because I am excited about GitHub.

GitHub is a social source control platform based on Git. Git is a whole different animal than SVN. Git has no concept of source and checked out copy. You can commit locally, you can easily branch and merge, you can push some branches to some central repos, and keep other to yourself for now, its amazingly dynamic. But I’m not here to talk about Git so much.

The first part that makes GitHub cool is the social thing. It’s been really hard for me to get into social networks. I try every once and a while and find it hard to convince my peers to join me on said network. I can upload a widget, or have a friends list, but I never seem to find any functionality that keeps me using the network for any length of time. GitHub is finally a social network I can get into. You don’t have “friends”, you have contibutors, watchers and forkers. You can add people to your project as contributors, people can simply keep an eye on your project by watching it, or they can fork your code to make their own modifications in their own sandbox. It’s completely addicting to see how many “Watchers” I have today. As of this writing the Fleximage watcher page lists 9 watchers. Not bad for less than 1 week in the wild.

Now, lets say someone wants to add some useful functionality to Fleximage. They can fork my code, without my permission, and work on their useful feature. They then let me know saying “I did some cool stuff, check it out”. I can clone their working repo, test it out, and integrate the diff with my code with just a few commands. Even if someone forks my code in order to overlay a monkey watermark on every image, that’s still fine. They can keep their forked little sandbox for themselves or whoever else wants to use it and I never have to pull in their changes at all.

The second part that is awesome is what this does for open source. The pricing model really encourages open source. Open source hosting is free. Private repositories cost money. Let that sink in a minute. This means that its easier and cheaper to release your project open source than not to. Previously, to open source a project you needed server side repository hosting, need a website for your project, in order to get those free you needed the convoluted rubyforge interface or ad laden source forge. This made it more time consuming and costly than a private codebase. So the “default” mode for most apps was private, because it was easier.

What GitHub did, was to make open source easier and cheaper than closed source. So going forward my apps will be, by default, open source. Thats a big deal. Now the little nuggets that I write every now and again will be opensourced on GitHub. Some of them may turn out to be nothing. But other may get forked by someone far smarter than me, enhanced, and eventually turned into something totally cool. Such scenarios never would be possible if there wasn’t an easy and free open source hosting platform like GitHub.

GitHub, you guys rock. The worldwide open source community has been greatly enhanced by the presence of GitHub. Give it some time and I think GitHub will be the defacto open source standard.