GitHub is an awesome place to share source code with others. They have a great UI, free repositories, a good social aspect, and even a place for private projects in exchange for a pittance. They seem to have taken over the open-source code-hosting industry, for the most part, and left others such as Gitorious in the dust. They even push you to choose an open source license for your project, and have a tool to help you decide which license to use.

There’s just one problem, GitHub is not open source!

Yes, that’s right. While you can purchase an enterprise license to install GitHub on your own machine, the source is not freely available. This is in contrast to Gitorious, which has the source for gitorious.org on gitorious.org, and even maintains an installer and virtual images to easily get up and running with their software. While it is not as polished as GitHub, it actually leads by example. How can GitHub push others to open-source their work when they themselves are not open source?

That’s not to say I won’t use GitHub at all, however it does mean that it will never be the primary location for any open source projects that I may be working on. All open source projects that I have contributed to in the past or will in the future are or will be mirrored on my own Gitorious installation at petris.io; Only my final changes will be pushed back to other sites, such as GitHub.

Update: I have since switched to using GitLab for petris.io. I still like Gitorious for “walking the walk”, however I do like GitLab better.