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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Github mainly succeeded because of the various shortcomings in Gits command line interface. Github made certain models of cooperative development incredibly easy, and since most or almost all of the open source development is just that the time was 100% ripe for something like github.

Still, it is an incredible achievement and I hope that github will be around for a very long time to come.

For a laugh:

http://svnhub.com/

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Git's quirks were surely a catalyst, especially helping the company to build momentum as Git grew. But Github added a lot more value than just that. I mean SourceForge was basically from the CVS + SVN era, and those tools were simpler and more intuitive, but SourceForge still served a great need.

I'd say GitHub mainly succeeded because it put code first and overall focused on a great experience for developers to contribute and collaborate. SourceForge, in contrast, was heavily influenced by consumers wanting to download the latest version of FileZilla or some Linux games.

And Google Code, for the brief time it was the main event, took things too far the other direction from SF. It was just too terse and the design too raw, as was customary for Google back then. It actually had the basis for a lot of the critical functionality, but lacked the kind of design flair GitHub has shown. I don't think it was ever seen as a potential profit center, so always seemed starved of the resources to compete with GitHub.

Github succeeded because they have build a fantastic platform, order of magnitude smoother, better looking, easier to use and faster than any of the similar projects. Try to navigate http://sourceforge.net/ or http://code.google.com/intl/pl/ for a while to get a feel of how free VC hosting looked like before Github - nobody approached the problem with a normal (in the industry) professional product design approach, it was just developers throwing things together, those are almost showcases for how bad developers can be at user experience design when left by themselves.

Actually, read the history of how github got started, they started exactly the way you describe: a hack put together by developers that needed that and built it as a side project without thinking about releasing it as a product.

Github would probably not have succeeded had git's command line interface been better? What rubbish. Github is a fantastic achievement. As aashaykumar92 says, making programming social and with a website that almost looks like it might be fun to normal people?? That's some achievement!

> Github would probably not have succeeded had git's command line interface been better? What rubbish.

Indeed. Except that it's your words, not mine.

I wrote: "Github mainly succeeded because of the various shortcomings in Gits command line interface."

The message, which apparently needs to be spelled out is that using a repo through a command line is a hard thing to do for many developers nowadays who think the command line is something for people with long beards. By putting a friendly face - and a web based face no less - on a really nice open source distributed repository tool github did exactly that which you need to do to gain mass adoption:

Make something people need easy to use and do it in a way they can afford. Then iterate like crazy to dig out a defensible moat around the basic core.

Github blew the doors of the competition including some corporate heavyweights by capitalizing on Git and the trend of collaboration in software development. If they had had to develop git from scratch, if git would have come with a web based front end or if an established competitor (say sourceforge) would have adopted git earlier or (when git was still just for open source nerds and SVN, mercurial or some other repo system used more for corporate) they would have had a much harder time of it.

History happened the way it did for a reason and git being very powerful but somewhat harder to use gave github an opening that they used to create a spectacular success.

Opportunities arise all the time, how you make use of them is what matters and without git as it was there would be no github today.

But why would I rephrase what the git guys said so eloquently on their first homepage:

"git repository hosting no longer a pain in the ass"

And:

"GitHub is the easiest (and prettiest) way to participate in that collaboration: fork projects, send pull requests, monitor development, all with ease. "

http://web.archive.org/web/20080514210148/http://github.com/

I stand by my comment. I see no clear difference in meaning between your wording and my rewording.

> "Github mainly succeeded because of the various shortcomings in Gits command line interface."

The success of github has nothing to do with shortcomings in git's CLI. As you say, for some people, the command line is for beards. So for them any CLI is a non-starter; nothing to do with shortcomings with git's CLI. The power available to a command line user of git is one of the reasons github is such a good thing.

Marc Hedlund: "One of my favorite business model suggestions for [web] entrepreneurs is to find an old UNIX command that hasn't yet been implemented on the web, and fix that." (2007)

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/04/when-in-doubt-make-...

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