Github was so accessible that it made possible what otherwise would not have been.
1. Are logistically harder.
2. Don't have an existing community.
If you want to create an OSS project with greatest adoption, you're best bet is GitHub.
The closest thing to PRs that I knew was reviewboard, and that was a bolt on to SVN, not an actual proper integration
Honest dumb question, how is Google benevolent in comparison to MS these days?
In my opinion a little bit more care must be taken here:
The "don't be evil" slogan was in my opinion both a blessing and a curse for Google: a blessing in that people initially trusted that Google does not intend to do something evil; a curse in the sense that when they started doing things that were considered "evil", it lead to a massive reputation damage for Google.
Slapping the Google name over the DoubleClick business model was the greatest swindle ever pulled, and people STILL don't see through it.
Citation needed
Google, with its ‘Don’t Be Evil’ mantra now a quaint echo from a bygone era, morphs the internet into its own playground. Each search, a breadcrumb trail, lures you deeper into its labyrinth, where your data is the prize – packaged, sold, and repackaged in an endless cycle of surveillance capitalism. The search engine that once promised to organize the world’s information now gatekeeps it, turning knowledge into a commodity, and in its wake, leaving a trail of monopolized markets, squashed innovation, and an eerie echo chamber where all roads lead back to Google.
Meanwhile, Microsoft, the once-dethroned king of the digital empire, reinvents itself under the guise of cloud computing and productivity, its tentacles stretching into every facet of our digital lives. From the operating systems that power our machines to the software that runs our day, Microsoft's empire is built on the sands of forced obsolescence and relentless upgrades, a Sisyphean cycle of consumption that drains wallets and wills alike. Beneath its benevolent surface of helping the world achieve more lies a strategy of dependence, locking society into a perpetual embrace with its ecosystem, stifling alternatives with the weight of its colossal footprint.
Together, Google and Microsoft architect a digital Panopticon, an invisible prison of convenience from which there seems no escape. Their decisions, cloaked in the doublespeak of innovation and progress, push society ever closer to a precipice where freedom is the currency, and autonomy a relic of the past. They peddle visions of a technocratic utopia, all the while drawing the noose of control tighter around the neck of democracy, commodifying our digital souls in the altar of the algorithm.
The moral is clear: in the shadow of giants, the quest for power blurs the line between benefactor and tyrant. As Google and Microsoft carve their names into the annals of history, the question remains – will society awaken from its digital stupor, or will we remain pawns in their grand game, a footnote in the epic saga of the corporate conquest of the digital frontier?
The tar-pit I'm afraid of: How do you emigrate Github PR and Issue databases in some format that any of self-hosted Forgejo, or public Codeberg, Gitlab et al understand and can present to visitors?
On top of that it's yet another site I have to sign up with if I want to interact with the community.
I'm also mindful of the risks of centralization. Discord and its lack of external archives is a prime example of how that can be harmful. I'm just not sure if that risk outweighs the costs and annoyances.
There are other places to go, without hosting your own: GitLab and BitBucket are two possibilities.
My point, since you replied to my post, was simply that prior to GitHub, none of the other sites for OSS were trying to achieve the same goal. The goal was to establish a specific OSS community for a set of projects. SourceForge was a bit of an outlier in that a lot of projects used their distribution network, if they were not part of a foundation like Apache or Eclipse that had extensive mirrors setup.
SourceForge was never the main development and collaboration site for any of the major efforts happening around OSS.
I would argue it's the other way around. Mercurial is a better source control system, and was a close contender with git back then. However, GitHub winning the hosting war and also being all in on git is what cemented git as the leader. Bitbucket was hosting both and with a more generous free plan, but they didn't win the social and UX fight so git became the de facto standard since that's what you used on the cool good new platform.
Also.. aggregators like freshmeat.net used to exist and did a huge amount of work patching these disparate communities and individual sites together into a single cohesive display of "open source."
The thought from the original growth of OSS was that it would be more about the community than the code. So OSS would be a series of communities that would each have their own "identity" for their community. There were big OSS foundations like Apache and Eclipse. Sun had several like java.net, OpenOffice.org and netbeans.org. Gnome had their own place etc.
Like Sun, other enterprises like HP, Oracle and IBM were setting up their own communities for their projects and to collaborate with partners.
And then as the post touches on there were sites like SourceForge, Tigris.org, Google Code and Microsoft had something too (CodePlex?). These sites were places projects might spin up if they did not belong at one of the other foundations and wanted a place to host their code for free. Of these SourceForge was often used for distribution of binaries due to its vast mirror network and often that was all that was hosted there and the project was elsewhere.
Anyway, until GitHub sprang up and started to consolidate all the OSS in one place, I do not think anyone else was even really trying to do this. Obviously the rise of git played a big role in this. This change fueled the growth of OSS but it did kind of come at the cost of losing out on some of the community aspects that existed before in the mailing lists and forums of these other places. Now collaboration all happens in PR's and Issue and is often just between a small handful of people.