Well, here's the beauty of Github--if they lose all my repos I just don't care. Since I've got a copy of my repos locally, there's absolutely nothing they can lose... Worse case if they go completely down for a couple days I can still collaborate using ssh or "git send-email".

This is the only reason I decided to use Github after avoiding Sourceforge and their ilk for the past decade and a half.

"This is the only reason I decided to use Github after avoiding Sourceforge and their ilk for the past decade and a half."

But why github? Why not gitorious.org?

If github goes away, I still have my code, but I lose any issues people have filed on the site, and I lose being able to easily check on forks of my projects where people might be doing interesting stuff.

I had been using gitorius.org, but moved to github for all the things other than git that makes one public git host different from another.

There is the Github API, so you could backup the non-repository data as well by writing a couple of scripts, if you were so inclined.

Right, and I should probably set up something to auto-snag that stuff where it counts, but having to do that is the sort of thing you have to so for any non-git-based site.

It'd be nice of all those related items were also in a repo, easy to pull.

That's the beauty of a DVCS (Git in this case) _not_ Github.

You mean this cloud? http://cloud.github.com/

Not sure how this is relevant. Github isn't hosted on any cloud.

http://www.anchor.com.au/blog/2009/09/github-designing-succe...

Well, every resource is locally on some physical machine somewhere. I think his point is that Github is often treated by its users as a "local" resource, in that it takes the place of what would otherwise be a local server running a Git front end or repository.

Now, Github probably wouldn't encourage total reliance on their service. Git is fundamentally distributed, so this doesn't have to be a problem. Still, the Github service is an integral part of many developers' workflow, and I do agree with the above commenter that I'm not sold on the idea of trusting remote servers with integral steps in my workflow.

This echoes my thoughts all along.

For open-projects, it's a FANTASTIC platform... no doubt about it.

For a corporate closed project, I honestly would not use github - not because of any feature or lack of them, but because it's a hosted service. I want control over where my code sits, period - if only for the same reason as most hosted services - a subpoena or similar court order can be served against the provider with no notification to the owner of the data. This is the #1 reason one should be careful basing one's business on hosted services.

is reliability the price of convenience, or the other way around?

edit: that makes no sense