Comment by jacques_chester

> Everything, really, seems to naturally trend towards centralization,

It's economics 101, really: division of labour and economies of scale. A company like Github can build and sustain capabilities that are flatly uneconomical for their customers to build themselves.

In terms of strategy, Github's lockin doesn't come from git. It comes from everything around it: issues, pull requests etc. This functionality can be replicated, but data has inertia. The more you have, the less you want to move it.

For an instructive parallel, consider how easy it is to use AWS Lambda with all of AWS's data-centric services.