GitHub

The episode opens immediately after Microsoft announced its $7.5 billion acquisition of GitHub. The hosts frame the deal as a meeting between a San Francisco developer platform and a Seattle technology company, then explain that understanding the price requires two kinds of context: how software projects are managed and how the open-source ecosystem evolved.

Software configuration management developed from a single shared machine, to centralized client-server repositories, and finally to distributed version control. Centralized systems made one repository canonical but made private experiments, long-running forks, and contributions from distributed developers awkward. BitKeeper helped manage Linux development in the late 1990s, but when its company withdrew the free license in 2005, the open-source community produced Mercurial and Git. Git, created by Linus Torvalds and quickly adopted by projects such as Linux and Hadoop, managed versions but did not itself provide a social place to host and discuss code.

The remaining gap was filled by code forges such as SourceForge and Google Code, but these mainly hosted files and basic project pages. The hosts describe a shift toward consumer social networks and ask what would happen if developer discussion, collaboration, and code hosting lived together. Tom Preston-Werner’s Grit project became the starting point: after an encounter with Chris Wanstrath at a Ruby on Rails meetup, the two began building a web interface for distributed Git repositories. They worked nights and weekends, used the product inside Chris and PJ Hyett’s startup, and launched GitHub in January 2008. Its immediate product-market fit created rapid adoption and also exposed the founders to substantial hosting costs.