Is GitHub the Future or Becoming Obsolete?
Over the last few months, I stumbled upon a few articles on GitHub's history and future. I find those quite interesting. Greg Foster gives a quick history of the rise of GitHub over the years, while Scott Chacon, one of GitHub’s co-founder, retraces the history of GitHub from the inside.
The story is great, and I’ll leave it to you to read those posts if you want to learn more. I was alive at that time; I saw and lived it all. I started using Git in 2005, and I’m the 2644th of the 100 million GitHub users—I joined GitHub in 2008 when it was still in beta.
It’s definitely true that Git won, and especially GitHub. I’ll probably have to write about GitLab at some point — but you won’t read any ranting here today. As Scott Chacon writes, GitHub had a taste and perfect timing and soon gained traction from the open-source community.
Ok, great, so GitHub wins. Where do we go now?
Microsoft
I believe that GitHub's growth was already on track before Microsoft bought it in 2018, but that move still changed everything. At that time, GitHub still lacked major features, such as a CI/CD system, and had a hard time being compared to GitLab. The following year that changed, and GitHub Actions started (thanks, Azure) and shook everything up.
If you read opinions about GitHub vs. GitLab, CodeCommit, Azure DevOps, or any other platform, you’ll mostly see engineers comparing user-visible features. And sure, this has value, and that might be your main criteria to pick one or the other if you’re a small team with full power over their choice.
However, this is not what GitHub and Microsoft are after anymore. Take a look at the roadmap of the last few years, and you’ll see a pattern: enterprise. Pushing code, creating pull requests, and any part of software engineers' day-to-day activities have been covered for the last 15 years.
They designed it, the industry adopted it, and GitHub has nothing in its roadmap to change that paradigm. They’re building on the momentum they raised.
Security, Copilot (AI), and compliance are items that the largest corporation needs to embrace a platform such as GitHub. This is only the beginning: this year, the GitHub sales organization underwent a reorganization to look more like Microsoft's sales organization. I suspect GitHub is now able to leverage even more Microsoft resources to push its platform to large corporations—which definitely makes sense. The link between GitHub and Azure is tightening, both technically and commercially.
For the best and the worst.
Relevance
How is GitHub still relevant if it does not innovate on developer workflow? Is it becoming legacy software?
There is certainly a disjunction between what developers and corporations expect, and at this point, if you look at the ratio between features, compliance, and price, there's no better alternative than GitHub. I don’t think this is going to change anytime soon.
For open-source projects, there might be alternatives, but if you’re pragmatic (and lazy), GitHub is the pick. There have been a number of projects trying to escape GitHub over the years, such as when Microsoft acquired it. The latter is still seen as an enemy of open source by some folks (I suspect this is PTSD caused by the Balmer era). More recently, another exodus was triggered by the announcement of Copilot and the fear that the training was done on free software. However, at this stage, it’s like emptying an ocean with a spoon, and the impact does not compensate for larger projects moving to GitHub (e.g., Python).
On the other hand, GitHub is attracting more competitors. It has grown to a point where many startups want to disrupt it: one can look at Radicle and its decentralized approach, Pierre and its modern design, Diversion with its game-centric approach, or Palmier, who’s building a new kind of repository.
They might succeed, but the road is going to be long to get massive adoption — and migration.
There’s nothing replacing GitHub in the short term. We better deal with it.