I think the social effects of GitHub are very strong. It's the de facto arena for open source collaboration. By using it, a project signals that they choose the most widely used community, and thus encourage participation. It's familiar. Everybody has an account. There's built in GitHub support in package managers, even, so the namespace of "githubuser/project" is valuable.

Personally I'm not interested in another clone of GitHub.com. Let's try another model entirely. Something more distributed and federated. That way lies diversity and immunity to lock-in. Let's collaborate in an open fashion using open protocols and decentralized hosting.

Agreed. I also see very little value in simply cloning GitHubg, that's one of my problems with GitLab. I like it, it's open source and the perfs get better, but at the end of the day, it is a clone of GitHub. Not much innovation. I would love to say a player take some risk and try to present a new model and new way to leverage Git.

How about a Git repository management application designed specifically for Sandstorm (https://sandstorm.io/)? Maybe call it Gitgrains.

What kind of innovation would you like to see? We already added protected branches, integrated CI and many other features. Our current plans are on https://about.gitlab.com/direction/

Any suggestions? Git over IPFS?

It's an interesting topic but I don't have much to offer.

IPFS seems neat as an object store. Sign your commits and throw them into IPFS and you're good? Given a persistent distributed object store, it seems less obvious how to publish projects, refs, and pull requests.

If you hear about "Rails", you want to be able to find the actual consensus Rails repository master branch in a trusted way. Some semantic data on https://rails.org/ maybe? Then the namespace for repositories is just the DNS namespace... But that's just one way of getting the data; any source you can verify should be fine. So a signed message by a trusted Rails maintainer published somewhere. I was imagining a kind of NNTP reflog with PGP signatures....

:-)

I agree. Especially for OSS developers. Maybe some integrations are missing with tools to monitor repositories, or automatically download dependencies.

I would actually be quite happy to see GH's monopoly fade a little. I personally don't like this company, but mostly I don't like the idea of one repo manager to rule them all.

There are three aspects I can see. One is firms that use github internally, who have gone through the pain of learning to manage it. As long as the license cost remains less than the cost of moving away, they'll stay. Two is organizations who have complex team setups. You'll have noticed GitHub's increasingly complex team management? This is sticky. The more you invest in clicking on the right buttons the more you feel committed to the platform. The third aspect is integration with external systems like Travis. We've come to depend on this as part of our process.

Apart from those three cases, I think it's still relatively easy to switch to something like gitlab.

People are very locked into their pull request and issue tracking tools, unfortunately.

I migrated a few projects to Gitlab and pull requests and issues seemed to come over with only one problem, all issues were created by me. Not a horrible experience, but could be better (and maybe if the original creators had gitlab accounts, they would have been correctly assigned).

>What does GitHub have that makes it irreplaceable in a short time?

All the alternatives are slow, clunky and ugly.

And unopinionated. It takes a tremendous amount of listening, polishing, and gardening to arrive at what github has built.