Github, I love you. You have saved my company months of engineering time because of all the third-party libraries that we can easily find and use through your service. We're only a year old, so taking the time to build all those features from scratch would be a massive tax.
And this is just one of the many, many benefits. Soon you'll have 3M users, then 5M, then 10M... who knows how big it'll get.
Obviously the library authors make this happen and I mean no slight to them. They rock. But this thread is about Github so I focus my comments on how they add value.
Github made it easier to share code and created a community. Now more people share. Github standardized project formats (which dougws points out below). It's easier to figure out what's in a library.
This makes it easier for me to build complex apps. It saves my company gob loads of time & money. I fucking love Github and I fucking love people who use it to share high quality code that I don't have to recreate.
I second this. Even if the library is just an experiment by someone, has been dead for 6 months, and has a few bugs, it's still going to save our team at least a week and up to several months worth of development time. Time that as a startup is invaluable.
Github's project pages present a really nice, standardized, easy way to find out what a library does. I am always relieved when I find out that a 3rd-party python library I want to use is hosted on github, as it means I can very easily read the documentation, browse the source code, and examine outstanding issues.
And this is just one of the many, many benefits. Soon you'll have 3M users, then 5M, then 10M... who knows how big it'll get.