> Is this guy genuinely suggesting that people fell in "love" with distributed version control solely because of GitHub?
The author suggests that the "tipping point" for Git adoption vs e.g. Mercurial was when Github made open source development a much more gameable, visibly social activity. Prior to that, every OSS project had a web page, a mailing list, a Sourceforge or code.google.com repo, etc. But no single use ID existed for developers across all of those little islands of identity and conversation. Github changed all of that.
Coming from the scientific Python community, I can absolutely attest to the huge long email threads as projects decided whether they were going to stick with SVN+Trac or Mercurial+Bitbucket or Git+Github. (This was before Bitbucket supported git.) In the end, all of them ended up going to Github because of the social stickiness, even though its ticket and tracking system is really primitive compared to what even Trac was able to do.
The author suggests that the "tipping point" for Git adoption vs e.g. Mercurial was when Github made open source development a much more gameable, visibly social activity. Prior to that, every OSS project had a web page, a mailing list, a Sourceforge or code.google.com repo, etc. But no single use ID existed for developers across all of those little islands of identity and conversation. Github changed all of that.
Coming from the scientific Python community, I can absolutely attest to the huge long email threads as projects decided whether they were going to stick with SVN+Trac or Mercurial+Bitbucket or Git+Github. (This was before Bitbucket supported git.) In the end, all of them ended up going to Github because of the social stickiness, even though its ticket and tracking system is really primitive compared to what even Trac was able to do.