> What GitHub Gave Us

To me one of the clear things that GitHub gave us was a structure around a person rather than a project. To me it felt liberating to quickly create a repository attached to my name than it was to go through the (what felt to me) very serious process of coming up with a project name and reserving it on sourceforge just to get a cvs or svn repository (along with website, mailing lists, issue tracking(?), etc, etc...). It felt like the mental load of "oh this is just a quick thing" was a lot easier with github.

> It gave projects issue trackers, pull requests, release pages, wikis, organization pages, API access, webhooks, and later CI.

Although it didn't give us this all at once. I still remember when we created a new user account in order to simulate an organisation, before they existed. I distinctly recall discussing with friends if we wanted to set up a bug tracker software for our project with the assumption that "GitHub will probably release one in a few months anyway". In the end we just kept a text file committed in the repository. Issues were announced a few months later.