Gitea, Gitlab and Sourcehut are all making money on open source. However, they themselves are open source projects and contribute to a wider ecosystem.

Github makes money without producing open source software. <rant>Well, that is if you don't count a sluggish electron-based text editor.</rant> Github is not open source, Github Pages is not open source, Github Actions is not open source. Sure, they offer free hosting for open source projects, but that kind of charity creates a hard dependency on Github for many projects, which is not healthy for the ecosystem.

What happens if Github closes? Or stops free offers for open source projects? To make an analogy from another ecosystem, if Mac Donalds started offering free meals to homeless people, that would not solve the problems of poverty and would not contribute to healthier food for the people or a more sane/ecological agriculture. That'd just be charity for their own gain.

I think you're selling GitHub's positive impact on open source really short.

It's important to see both sides to the benefits/risks analysis. Let that be a counterpoint to the people overselling the positive impact without ever mentioning the immediate or potential downsides. Nothing is ever truly binary outside of computing.

Historically, sure, GH was a great open source incubator. These days? It's an utter shitshow being used as chum for the Microsoft's AI monster.

I've whined endlessly about how buggy and generally awful the new UI is, but what really drove it home is having to use an old computer with an old browser. Absolutely nothing (not even static text) loads on Github without a modern javascript interpreter.

Github is ready to be put out to pasture.

Producing OSS is not the only way to contribute to the OSS ecosystem, github offers free services for OSS developers who otherwise would have to host them themselves, that's the reason why they got so popular and i think we can all agree on the fact that it's incredibly useful.

> Producing OSS is not the only way to contribute to the OSS ecosystem

Yes, it is. Otherwise, your contribution is not part of the OSS ecosystem.

> github offers free services for OSS developers who otherwise would have to host them themselves

Github offer free services to anyone, OSS or not.

> that's the reason why they got so popular and i think we can all agree on the fact that it's incredibly useful

I think we can all agree it's called a "loss leader". It's not useful whatsoever to those who refuse to further enrich a for-profit company producing proprietary software which considers your own assets to be their proprietary data (see also: Copilot). In fact it makes things more difficult for us because we're locked out of contributing to virtually any OSS project.

I'm not even sure the poster you're responding to is correct on a technical level.

My understanding (possibly flawed) is that github started by using the current git tooling but that they soon started running into issues because the CLI tools were never meant to scale and never as a web application.

So they wrote their own implementation of git (their own tool that understands git repositories) but did so in a way that's more compatible with the scale and the web-oriented work they do.

So it's not even clear to me how much of the actual code they have running is open source.

They make money off the code hosted on Github, which is by-and-large open source. Github makes money off of open source software whether they themselves run open source software (almost certainly yes) or not.

The question posed is how does github make money off of OSS in a way that other similar services do not. Since they all host OSS software in one form or another, that observation isn't relevant.