Git and Github are are like philosophically opposed. Git is distributed. Who cares if a hosting server is lost? 5 minutes and you're up on a different server.
Someone who needs to clone your repository (e.g. you're a dependency for their project) cares.
Someone tired of using an inactive repo and trying to get an overview of healthy forks cares.
Someone whose project uses GitHub for more than just a raw git repo (e.g. issues, wiki, releases with precompiled/crossplatform binaries) cares.
Someone searching for answers who encounters a link to some GitHub gist cares.
Not if youre Joe Chinese Dev wanting to collaborate with an OSS project hosted on Github. "Hey, can you guys move everything to this service that doesn't block China so I can send you push requests/issues/etc" is probably going to go nowhere.
They can use git. They can use mailing lists. They can use carrier pigeons to exchange pull requests. That's not what the concern is about.
If the OSS project says that all collaboration work has to happen on their Github projects, and Github's forced to block China - then Chinese devs would no longer able to collaborate.
They would need someone outside China to be willing to take their pull request/log an issue/etc.
My point is to underscore the point of the ancestor of this thread: that you (the project) don't need github. You can use all the strength of git without github.
I was doing some analytics on various crypto projects on GitHub, and was surprised by the number of them that had authors without GitHub accounts. These show up in the commit API as having 'author' and/or 'committer' as null (the commit itself has an author that's whatever you set your "git config user.name/email", which may not be a registered GitHub user). You have to handle these cases or your analytics script will crash very soon, because it's a pretty common case.
Git - the protocol - helps enable a distributed edit & merge ... but Git itself is not a Schelling Point. Github is a Schelling Point. (I made a previous comment about this conceptual difference.[0])
Likewise, the HTTP protocol can't be a Schelling Point but web nodes that use http like Facebook or HN can be Schelling Points.
(One can get pedantic and argue that pure protocols like git/http/tcpip can also be viewed as Schelling Points on a relative basis (compared to 1960s AT&T leased-lines) but we don't have to dissect that because the social congregation around sites like Github happens at a higher layer than the protocol.)
>Who cares if a hosting server is lost? 5 minutes and you're up on a different server.
Google announced shutdown of Google Code on March 2015: https://venturebeat.com/2015/03/12/google-code-disables-new-...
Microsoft announced shutdown of CodePlex on March 2017: https://venturebeat.com/2017/03/31/github-wins-microsoft-is-...
Not only did both Google and Microsoft abandoned their own public code collaboration websites, they also both tried to acquire Github.[1] As we now know, MS had the better offer to Github's owners in 2018.
Both corporate giants had the money to run their own git-protocol compatible servers and yet they abandoned them for Github. Think about why did that.
Maybe the reasons are social, not technical? Therefore, spending 5 minutes to move a git repo to an unknown server doesn't actually accomplish the same thing Github accomplishes.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14894128
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=google+tried+to+buy+github
Huge amounts of OSS projects are hosted on Github - that's where their code is, their issues are. If you want to report issues or collaborate, you need to use Github.
The issue would also spread to other related tech, which integrates with Github.
Sure, there's ways around it, and more than likely Chinese devs would set up their own instances to work around the blocks - it would limit/reduce overall collaboration. A net-loss for everyone.
Nothing stops you from publishing the same project to both github and gitlab.
Why would a project that's already happily working with the Github ecosystem want to also have to support publishing to a platform that doesn't block China? Lots more work on project maintainers.
Yes, that's very much my point - GitHub is.
To suggest that GitHub is somehow the same thing as git, but centralized (=> bad) is missing 99% of the value GitHub offers.
If you want to file a PR you need access to whatever the maintainer chose. If the maintainer wants PRs via github and won't accept them via email, your alternatives are to access github, not submit the PR, or have a proxy access github for you. Possibly a human proxy.
That said, I'd love a decentralised alternative based on IPFS or somesuch. There's probably something out there already, perhaps this may be impetus enough to cause devs to move? Seems unlikely.
GitHub provides an easy implementation of many things that are more difficult in a decentralised model.