Github's strength is that it allows for incredibly easy collaboration. If you want to make a change to any open source project, you just need to fork it, make changes in your copy, and send a pull request to the original author. Neither Google code nor SourceForge offers such a simple contribution mechanism.
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I haven't participated in any Github projects yet, so forgive me if I'm missing something, but isn't what you're describing a part of DVCS (Distributed Version Control Systems) in general, and not Git per se? (and, least of all, GitHub?)
Couldn't one do what you're describing with a Google Code project that uses Mercurial? Or at bitbucket.org using Mercurial? Or at launchpad.net using Bazaar?
I don't think StrawberryFrog's question has been adequately answered: "what's with the assumption that github is the one true way?..."
I don't think anyone said GitHub is "the one true way". I think you'll find more and more people putting code on GitHub, because of the general uptick in contributions when code is hosted there.
(disclosure: I work for GitHub)
I don't think anyone said GitHub is "the one true way".
I'm pretty sure the question was meant a bit more loosely, not as a direct challenge to someone's post here, but to the general prevalence of a meme that roughly fits that description. I certainly wouldn't suggest grepping for that phrase as a method of getting a feel for its virulence out "in the wild".
Instead, look or tacit assumptions, misattribution's of value, and conspicuous omission of alternatives. I guess good, old-fashioned "reading between the lines" is what I'm suggesting.
A pretty dramatic illustration popped up on my RSS reader this morning. Someone submitted a HN article with the title "Jeff Atwood's open source contributions", which was nothing but a link to http://github.com/codinghorror - which currently shows zero projects. It was quickly flagged here at HN, but it lives on over at Reddit.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1023696
The tacit assumption here is that if Jeff has zero repositories at GitHub, then he has made zero open source code contributions.
I don't mean to detract from how cool it is that your product is so successful. (Kudos!) But its fans often have a creepy blind spot to alternatives, in my opinion.
Full marks for getting to the core of what I was asking. It seems almost like a year ago nobody had heard of github; and now there are people who don't seem to have heard of anything else.
Not to take away from GitHub being good, but I'm asking what makes it seems that good.
I put a new code on Github and it seems all right. But I'm not going to move code that's been hosted elsewhere for several years even if something slightly better comes along. Consistency is a virtue.
I don't think anyone said GitHub is "the one true way".
No, I don't think anyone did. pohl's comment that it's meant about "the general prevalence of a meme that roughly fits that description" is about right.
because of the general uptick in contributions when code is hosted there.
Github is a slick and friendly home for open source, even if the Windows Ui tools for git still need a lot of polish. But do you have numbers to back that idea? It could well be true, who knows.