Comment by andrew_
8 years ago
Not sure if this is an age-gap or participation-gap here but that's EXACTLY what we did before Github came along. My foray into open source started in '99 and it wasn't until 2010? that we had good centralized alternatives to switch to. Hell, jQuery was on a hosted version of Trac until just recently. And yes, we spent time on it. A great deal more than "very few" did the same and were involved and passionate about it.
You're absolutely right! That's exactly what open source developers used to do. In some cases, still do.
Is it perhaps possible that there are non-trivial advantages to the ecosystem that's grown up around GitHub?
I know I've written and released code that would have stayed closed-source forever if I had to manage my own listserv, wiki, and CVS around it.
Why do you think open source is so much more accessible and popular today?
Not all of us. I have been writing open source since approx. 1998, and I remember hosting my code on sourceforge, and announcing on freshmeat. There was also a few other central repositories, and some major projects having their own CVS and later Subversion repositories. Later came Google Code that I used too, circa 2004 or 2005. But I clearly remember people, myself included, looking for a code repository they could use for their source code.
Funny you say that, as 1999 was the year that SourceForge was launched.
Back in the day that was the centralised site that people used to host code, mailing-lists, issues, and etc.
Right - and before VPSs, running a server for an open-source project often meant having to have real metal in a data centre somewhere, too!