How the Heck Do I Use GitHub? What Exactly Is GitHub Anyway? Andreessen Horowitz announced a whopping $100 million investment in GitHub this week. You can read commentary and speculation all over the web about what GitHub will do with the money, whether this was a good investment for Andreessen Horowitz and whether taking such a large investment is a good thing for GitHub. But what the heck is GitHub and why are developers so excited about it?
You may have heard that GitHub is a code sharing and publishing service, or that it’s a social networking site for programmers. GitHub needs to take open source seriously. Some of the would-be cool kids of software say we are in the "post open source" world.
Several weeks ago, James Governor, founder of analyst firm RedMonk, put it this way on Twitter : "younger devs today are about POSS - Post open source software. f*** the license and governance, just commit to github. " But as Outercurve Foundation's CTO Stephen Walli replied , "promiscuous sharing w/out a license leads to software transmitted diseases. " Since then, I have heard more and more people mention this trend of regarding the copyright and collaboration terms of a project as irrelevant bureaucracy.