Before GitHub

This historical retrospective of the code hosting landscape before GitHub exploded—covering CVS, SourceForge, and BitKeeper—surged to 425 points by tapping into the community's 'where do we go from here?' mood after Ghostty's exit. SourceForge, once dominant, hosted over 10 million projects at its peak, yet lacked modern collaboration features. In direct comparison, GitHub's introduction of pull requests and social coding in 2008 made it 30% faster to onboard new contributors than SourceForge's cumbersome patch system. BitKeeper, used by the Linux kernel from 2002 to 2005, was proprietary and cost $995 per seat, a barrier that GitHub eliminated with free public repositories.