In a previous post, I discussed Marc Andreessen's Five Big Ideas That Have Shaped The Internet. If we string the last three of those ideas together, we get a pretty good idea of why Andreessen Horowitz made the investment: "Web Business Will Live in the Cloud... Everything Will Be Social... and Software Will Eat the World."
TechCrunch just posted a great primer on what GitHub is, but the relevant facts are that GitHub is both a code sharing and publishing service, and a social networking site for programmers. It is based on Git, an open source project started by Linux creator Linus Torvalds. And it's key features—the fork, the pull request and the merge—streamline collaboration on open-source projects, but could be used to version control anything.
As Forbes staffer Tomio Geron wrote in these pages, GitHub has resisted venture money until now. CEO Tom Preston-Werner found in Andreessen Horowitz a sympathetic partner to help execute the company's "Github Everywhere" strategy. Geron has done a great job describing the importance of the investment to GitHub, and of differentiating it from its key competitor, Atlassian.
I wanted to add these dimensions to the story:
1. What distinguishes GitHub as a social network from, say, LinkedIn, is that it is a true meritocracy. Although you can build your presence on LinkedIn through "socializing," your status on GitHub is determined by your record of forks and pulls and merges—by what you actually do.
2. This kind of meritocratic social network will also be an important component of online education. It is all well and good to take courses online, but a big part of the value of higher education is the connections you make to peers pursuing similar interests. Networks that reward access through constructive work should be a key aspects of online educational efforts.
3. If the tools that GitHub provides to programmers can be democratized even further through the support of more platforms and improved user experience, the net productivity of our time spent online could vastly improve. GitHub could be the means of converting consumers into producers.
More on GitHub coming soon.
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