The GitHub Revolution

We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us. - Churchill

Once again, Mikeal Rogers has a thoughtful and insightful post called "Apache Considered Harmful." I have no opinion or personal interaction with the Apache Foundation. Rather my focus is on his view of git versus subversion. He calls it "The GitHub Revolution." I could not agree more even though I'm not very active on GitHub.

On GitHub the language is not code, as it is often characterized, it is contribution. GitHub presents a person to person communication system for contributions. Documentation, issues, and of course code, travel between personal repositories. 

The communication medium is the contribution itself. Its value, its merit, its intentions, all laid naked for the world to see. There is no hierarchy or politic embedded in the system. The creator of a project has a clear first mover advantage but the possibility is always there for its position to be supplanted by a fork, creating a social imperative to manage contributions in a satisfactory manor to her community. 

GitHub is truly a system of anarchism, in the most classic sense of the term. It is a system of communication and contribution that is without a central organization or institution of governance. Sure, it is hosted, developed, and maintained by someone but they do not enforce any set of governance or process over the users of the system. 

It is my belief that we are, right now, in the middle of a very large evolution in the ecology of open source. The language of contribution has infected a new generation of open source contributors. Much of the potential first imagined by open source pioneers is being realized by high school kids on a daily basis who contribute effectively with less effort than has ever been required.

The post goes on to discuss the bias of Apache to Subversion as a repository.

The Git versus Subversion has a long history but that has mainly been a comparison of features. For me that is like comparing the features of television versus radio, or books versus ebooks. Mikeal's argument is a more important and an interesting view. I'm looking at the influence of the underlying technologies.

Git is not Subversion. They are different media, different technologies. Different media do not allow the same content. Just as a newspaper cannot tell a story the same way as television, so too Git projects will not be the same as Subversion projects. You cannot cram a GitHub project into subversion. People are also using GitHub for writing blogs, books and many different ways than simply a code repository. As Mikael points out there is substantial communications in the hub. The technologies are different. What is created is different.

The GitHub revolution is part of a larger cultural change. As Om Malik pointed out, Dribble and SoundCloud are part of this revolution. The results of Hackatons, Camps and Startup Weekends are impressive. These projects, services, projects and communities are our new cultural artefacts which are changing hiring practices and people's identity.

The definition of Open Source is also changing perhaps to the breaking point. We probably need a new term to describe the content being created on these platforms. Times are changing.

A technology choice is important and Mikeal has provided a strong argument for choosing GitHub. In addition, I expect that in the future we may see less companies choose the Apache way, just as a generation ago we saw companies no longer see the need to move from NASDAQ to the NYSE.