Cannot emphasize this whole notion enough; Very roughly, Github is to git what gmail is to email.
It's mostly probably fine if that's the thing most of everybody wants to use and it works well; but also it's very unwise to forget that the point was NEVER to have a deeply centralized thing -- and that idea is BUILT into the very structure of all of it.
This reminded me of another discussion on HN a few months ago. Wherein I was reflecting on how the entire culture of internet standards has changed over time:
"In the 80s and 90s (and before), it was mainly academics working in the public interest, and hobbyist hackers. Think Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, IETF for web/internet standards, or Dave Winer with RSS. In the 00s onward, it was well-funded corporations and the engineers who worked for them. Think Google. So from the IETF, you have the email protocol standards, with the assumption everyone will run their own servers. But from Google, you get Gmail.
[The web] created a whole new mechanism for user comfort with proprietary fully-hosted software, e.g. Google Docs. This also sidelined many of the efforts to keep user-facing software open source. Such that even among the users who would be most receptive to a push for open protocols and open source software, you have strange compromises like GitHub: a platform that is built atop an open source piece of desktop software (git) and an open source storage format meant to be decentralized (git repo), but which is nonetheless 100% proprietary and centralized (e.g. GitHub.com repo hosting and GitHub Issues)."
From: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42760298
Yes. And honestly though, this is the sort of thing that makes me generally proclaim that Free Software and Open Source won.
It was extremely unlikely that it would be some kind of free utopia; but also, it's extremely remarkable what we've been able to keep generally free, or at least with a free-enough option.
Idk if git was designed to not be used in a centralized way. Like all other common CLIs, it was simply designed to work on your PC or server without caring who you are, and nothing stopped a corp from turning it into a product. Torvalds made git and Linux, then he put Linux on Github.
The reason Linus wrote Git was specifically because he was unwilling to accept the centralization of the existing popular source-control systems like CVS and SVN, and Linux's license to the unpopular proprietary decentralized source control system it was using got revoked because Larry McVoy threw a tantrum. Linus needed an open-source alternative, so he tried the unpopular open-source source-control systems like Monotone, but he felt they suffered from both featuritis and inadequate performance, so he wrote a "stupid content tracker" called Git.
"Distributed" was the point and the language their site uses*, not decentralized. It's only described as a convenience and reliability thing in contrast to the mess known as CVS. I haven't seen a note about avoiding one entity having too much power, even if that's a goal some users have in mind. Normally you have one master repo, or "blessed" as the site calls it.
It's like, a Redis cluster is distributed but not decentralized. The ssh protocol is not decentralized. XMPP, Matrix, and Bitcoin are decentralized protocols, first two via federation.
It's mostly probably fine if that's the thing most of everybody wants to use and it works well; but also it's very unwise to forget that the point was NEVER to have a deeply centralized thing -- and that idea is BUILT into the very structure of all of it.