My random thoughts about politics, society and technology (tag: selfhosting)

The next Generation of Code Hosting Platforms

The last few weeks there has been a lot of rumors about GitHub. GitHub is a code hosting platform which tries to make it as easy as possible to develop software and collaborate with people. The main achievement from GitHub is probably to moved the social part of software development to a complete new level. As more and more Free Software initiatives started using GitHub it became really easy to contribute a bug fix or a new feature to the 3rd party library or application you use. With a few clicks you can create a fork, add your changes and send them back to the original project as a pull request. You don’t need to create a new account, don’t need to learn the tools used by the project, etc. Everybody is on the same platform and you can contribute immediately. In many cases this improves the collaboration between projects a lot. Also the ability to mention the developer of other projects easily in your pull request or issue improved the social interactions between developers and makes collaboration across different projects the default.

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