Re:Ask HN: What was OSS like before Github?
by dedward on Tuesday July 23, 2013 @12:06PM
(#6090898)
While there was of course great variety... the most common would have been an email mailing list.
Maintainers of a piece of software would run some kind of VC repository usually, although not usually a distributed one like GIT - they were networked. Some people had commit access.
You'd keep a changelog, just like today, and the group would tag and release, just like today.
What Git/Github brings to the table is really the combination of a distributed version-control system that gained large traction (GIT) and a system to leverage that to make common collaboration tasks easier (fork, pull request, tracking meta-data, etc).
Maintainers of a piece of software would run some kind of VC repository usually, although not usually a distributed one like GIT - they were networked. Some people had commit access. You'd keep a changelog, just like today, and the group would tag and release, just like today.
What Git/Github brings to the table is really the combination of a distributed version-control system that gained large traction (GIT) and a system to leverage that to make common collaboration tasks easier (fork, pull request, tracking meta-data, etc).