> Basically, GitHub.

This. Which basically means: no time to setup, no operations overhead, no administration required. This means, no dedicated team member needed who is the "admin" for version control, no dedicated infra required, etc. In the early 2000s when we were a team of 8 developers, one was a "ClearCase admin". He was a single point of contact for all things ClearCase (request him to create a new branch, add a new user, create a label, create a new repository and so on). He also had to ensure regular backups were done, the server was regularly patched, the disk had enough space. GitHub/Gitlab simply remove all of this just for a few dollars per user.

While I can identify with the ClearCase/Perforce/etc admin issue, there were a multitude of code hosting solutions that predate GitHub. Google code supported subversion and mercurial; Before that, tigris.org supported subversion; before that, Sourceforge supported CVS.

I watched git take over in several companies before anyone had ever heard of GitHub. One reason for Git’s success in my mind is that the actual competition in practice was Perforce, not Mercurial, and Perforce’s workflow and scripting UX and design are stuck in 1997… still! ;)

imagine "SubversionHub" instead...

that's sourceforge :)

SourceSafeHub...