A bloke called Linus Thorvalds created git for Linux development when the commercial service used for that ceased to be useful, for one non technical reason or another.

github basically shoves a webby frontend and workflows on top of someone else's work. That's all fine and good but github is not git.

As a professional IT consultant, I want tools, I use lots of other's and I also create my own and I also generally insist on hosting my own. I'm also a fair carpenter and several other trades. I have tools for all my trades and I look after all of them. That way I can guarantee quality - or at least reproducible and documented quality.

I'm sure you are fine with abrogating responsibility for stuff that you are not able to deal with - that's all good: Your choice.

EDIT: Sorry, forgot to say: "Yay cloud"

Linux development is also centralized. Instead of Github they use an email list that has patches sent to it. If that goes down, your change isn't going into Linux today.

That's the entire point of it being decentralized. It doesn't have to, nor do you need it to.

I contend that if you submit a patch under any circumstances your change isn’t going into linux today.

You do know what's a mailing list right? You seem to be confusing it with GitHub.

A mailing list can go down and nothing would happen. The main point is to post patches to the maintainer. The mailing list is for a public record of things.

The only centralised thing is repo hosting on kernel.org. And that isn't the only official place, you can get the repo published on googlesource or GitHub, so it isn't exactly central enough.

I suppose that's true. In any case, though, getting a backup mailing list going is much much easier than something like GitHub, and you can always mail patches directly if maintainers allow it.

I believe he found the open source tools being used (CVS?) weren't good enough, and he started using a commercial closed source tool called "bitkeeper", which rankled the ire of the FOSS community who wanted to eat their own dogfood.

So Torvald's opted to "clone" the features of bitkeeper into an open source version he named 'git'.

That's the story I heard, no idea if it's true.

They were using BitKeeper for years but git was created when BitKeeper pulled the rug licensing-wise.

Source: A Git Story from https://blog.brachiosoft.com/en/posts/git/

Bitkeeper pulled the rug because they agreed not to reverse engineer it and then someone did.

As a professional software developer, you rely on software written by those hobbyist hackers.

Whenever you do a clone or an npm install or apt get or pip install, etc...

You choose github because your dependencies chose git

Sure, but as you say those hobbyist developers aren't responsible for keeping a specific server up. They are 'just' writing some software.

(And even among professionals, there's a big difference between Site Reliability Engineering and Software Engineering.)

It was down for ~45 mins according to the linked page page, which would put it at 99.897% uptime for the month, assuming no other downtime.

They had some more downtime a few days ago, too. And that's just the one I happened to notice.

And if your central hub for your distributed vcs needs more than 2-3 9s of uptime for your service to be reliable, honestly you’ve done something really wrong in the design phase like using version control as a database.

four 9's uptime https://uptime.is/99.99

Daily: 8.6s

Weekly: 1m 0.48s

Monthly: 4m 21s

Quarterly: 13m 2.4s

Yearly: 52m 9.8s

If you assume that "uptime" means all tools are available

https://statusgator.com/services/github

this appears to be 45 minutes in just one day

Incident with Git Operations 30m Jan 14, 2025 9:01 AM Down

Incident with Git Operations 10m Jan 14, 2025 8:51 AM Down

Incident with Git Operations 5m Jan 14, 2025 8:46 AM Down

Not much margin to hit four 9's left for the rest of the year.

> GitHub 99.99% uptime is something I can rely on.

Their enterprise level SLA is only 99.9% (measured quarterly) and the remedy is a 10% credit, increasing to a 25% credit if they drop below 99%.