I don't see this as assuming that open source is only Github, its just a matter of practicality. If you want to build a tool that interacts with git repos it is easier to use the Github API than it is to deal with bare git repos, SVN repos, and other random open source projects distributed as tarballs, etc.

I speak from experience, having built a crawler and search engine that extracts changelogs from open source projects on Github, parses them, and provides an API for changelogs. [1] I probably never would have built this project if the only thing that had been available to me was bare git repos. It's the github API that makes this search engine possible.

The side effect of the Github "monopoly" is that Github can afford to provide a decent API that makes it possible to do things that simply aren't feasible if you are facing a non standard collection of bare git, svn, mecurial, etc repos.

[1] https://changelogs.md/

GitHub is so strongly associated with Open Source right now for a few reasons.

First, git is decentralized by default. GitHub has very little secret sauce here; most, if not all, of their cool git tricks are actually pushed upstream into the git client to benefit everybody. For remote management, I can run `git init --bare` in any directory on any ol' ssh box I want and then set it up as a remote and get the same exact `git push` experience. Or use any of the strategies that git supports for interacting with remotes.

So GitHub chose a great decentralized tool as their foundation, and then got the community UX right. There's easy permissions management, easy SSH key management and instructions, issue and PR tracking, easily-accessed discussion, etc. GitHub is 95% about community and 5% about easy repo management, IMO.

That said, they're no longer the only player in town. They're the most universally understood, but you can easily set up a GitLab CE server on your own hardware if you want the same thing for free, but there are management costs associated with that.

I think the other critical reason GitHub is associated with open source software is that, after all, it's 100% free for open source software. You get all the above features for free if you don't discriminate about who can see and clone your code. GitLab will give you free private repos, but in my opinion I think GitHub takes the better stance here for the Open Source world. "You want free tools? You have to either pay up or share."

git is decentralized, but the most common workflow makes it basically a slightly better SVN. There is always one authoritative upstream repo, and everyone just pushes to that. Really, GitHub + git is better than SVN in only two ways: better merge tools to make branches cheaper, and local branches. Almost everything else could already be done with SVN (or similar) before. git's decentralized nature is only really used by the Linux kernel developers AFAIK.

You can commit without pushing, and generally have full freedom to rearrange your repository locally. So no, lots of us make use of Git’s decentralization all the time, even without mailing patches.

> GitHub has very little secret sauce here

GitHub's secret sauce was to use dark patterns meant to accelerate the network effect working in their favor.

Specifically:

1. Quietly kill patches as the main currency in open source

2. Redefine "pull request" to mean "the thing that happens when you click a certain button on github.com"

The end result is that collaborating with GitHub-hosted projects is made arbitrarily difficult unless you're also hosting your work on GitHub.

How did they "kill patches"?

Well, when is the last time you (or anyone else) ever submitted a patch through GitHub? Answer: never. Check out the lengths the Git project itself has to go through to work around the busted GitHub-style pull request mechanism GitHub invented.

Well, that seems to me to be because they provided an alternative to patches that works a lot better for me and the projects I contribute to, and I can't blame them for it.

> That said, they're no longer the only player in town.

They never were. Before github everything was on sourceforge.

As far as I understand, Github is mainly American, meaning that US export restrictions apply, right? I'm not sure how that fits the "freedom" point.

Unless I'm mistaken, I don't think he/she mentions open source at all?

At the same time it's better to have a working project and having the satisfaction of shipping than going in circles trying to appease everyones definitions of open source.

The whole thing is about "show your Github contributions", further cementing Github's monopolism, right?

I think it's more "I've created a way to make your Github contributions into a poster." I understand where you are coming from, but it's a tad bit reactionary, don't you think?

If I created a website for you to turn a user's facebook activity statistics into a T-Shirt I would hope that you don't think it is contributing to facebook's monopolism of social media.

Maybe a way to also include Bitbucket statistics (or something) would be nice. I don't know. Sorry, I might indeed have been quite harsh.

This comment is very off-topic.

Nowhere does this project say that "GitHub = open source" and I'm not sure why you're harping on it here. In fact, this project can even include private (ie. non-open source) commits, making your point even more irrelevant.

On the other hand, I find Github extremely useful. 90% of the time when I'm looking for a library, Github's search box is the first place I go.

Then if I can't find it that way, I begrudgingly head over to Google.