Before GitHub
The author reflects on the evolution of open source software hosting before GitHub became dominant, recalling earlier platforms like SourceForge, self-hosted Trac and Subversion, and Bitbucket. GitHub transformed open source by lowering barriers to publishing and consuming code, fostering community and collaboration. The piece expresses concern over GitHub's current trajectory, emphasizing how its role extended beyond code hosting to being central to open source social infrastructure.
- ▪Before GitHub, many open source projects were hosted on platforms like SourceForge or on self-hosted infrastructure using Subversion and Trac.
- ▪The author ran their own open source infrastructure, including servers for version control, documentation, and mailing lists, which was common practice at the time.
- ▪GitHub's rise coincided with a cultural shift toward frictionless code sharing and an explosion of micro-dependencies in open source development.
- ▪Distributed version control systems like Git and Mercurial enabled new collaboration models, but also changed the relationship between developers and project infrastructure.
- ▪GitHub became more than a code repository—it served as a social hub where professional relationships and friendships formed within the open source community.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Before GitHub written on April 28, 2026 GitHub was not the first home of my Open Source software. SourceForge was. Before GitHub, I had my own Trac installation. I had Subversion repositories, tickets, tarballs, and documentation on infrastructure I controlled. Later I moved projects to Bitbucket, back when Bitbucket still felt like a serious alternative place for Open Source projects, especially for people who were not all-in on Git yet. And then, eventually, GitHub became the place, and I moved all of it there. It is hard for me to overstate how important GitHub became in my life. A large part of my Open Source identity formed there. Projects I worked on found users there. People found me there, and I found other people there.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings.
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