Good article. I honestly had no idea GitHub was a proprietary service. Makes my choice of source repos MUCH easier...git.kenzoid.com is now on the task list. Why on earth would I stick proprietary centralized server on top of a distributed version control system?? I'll run my own, stick a copy in S3 or something as well, and maybe talk someone into holding a copy of my source, while I hold a copy of theirs! - Ken Kennedy

Ken, because GitHub layers useful functionality on top of Git, it doesn't remove any, nor disturbs the distributed nature of the SCM. You can treat GitHub simply as a node of your distributed graph. GitHub also isn't completely closed source, things such as our service hooks, rubygem builder, and the Grit (Ruby Git) library that powers the entire site are all open source. At the end of the day, you still need to point people to your source somewhere in a distributed system and putting your code on GitHub makes that easy to do. - PJ Hyett

Point taken, PJ. I added git to my revision control toolkit fairly recently (coming from cvs, svn, a short stop at arch, and mercurial (which I still use as well)); I haven't paid that close attention to GitHub other than to note it exists and gets a lot of buzz. I will dig in more deeply and review your offerings (I certainly grok the fact that it's only a node in the graph, but good point). Note, however, I am an advocate of autonomo.us and the Franklin Street Statement, so I'm coming at things from that angle. That being said, I very much appreciate your response, and I look forward to checking GitHub out more closely. Thanks for commenting! - Ken Kennedy