Yes, there was a couple of years we all believed GitHub would eventually turn into a open platform made by and for FOSS, but then they took on VC investments after some years and the dream went into hiding again.
> we all believed GitHub would eventually turn into a open platform made by and for FOSS
I really don't remember it like this at all. I do remember looking for actually open source forges and choosing Gitorious, which was then bought and shutdown by GitLab (and projects were offered to be seamlessly migrated, which worked well, and somehow we ended up being hosted on an open core platform, but that's another story).
GitHub always looked like the closed platform the whole open source world somehow elected to trust for their code hosting despite being proprietary, and then there was this FOMO where if you weren't on GitHub, your open source software would not find contributors, which still seems to be going strong btw.
I understand their was hope that GitHub would be open sourced, but I don't think there was any reason to believe it would happen.
> I understand their was hope that GitHub would be open sourced, but I don't think there was any reason to believe it would happen.
Yeah, I don't think me myself had good reasons beyond "They seem like the good guys who won't sell out", but I was also way younger and more naive at that point (it was like 15 years ago after all).
I think I mostly just drank the cool-aid of what you mentioned as "if you weren't on GitHub, your open source software would not find contributors". There was a lot of "We love Open Source and Open Source loves us" from GitHub that I guess was confusing to a young formative mind who wanted it to become like the projects they wanted to host. This hope was especially fueled when they started open sourcing parts of GitHub, like the Gollum stuff for rendering the wikis.
