The problem solved by Github's centralization was establishing a namespace, which could have been done in several other ways. (In fact there are a number of other namespaces orthogonal to Github's but pointing at largely the same resources.) The problem Github solved that convinced lots of OSS people to use it was a reliable offsite that was free as in beer and less obnoxious than Sourceforge. So far it seems like some combination of VC cash and paid usage sustains Github's free service, and several other firms' free services as well. The centralization bit doesn't seem so important.
It's a lot more than just a reliable offsite -- it invented collaboration features that didn't exist in pure Git. Github's pull request and code review workflow has become pervasive in the industry.
It's also not sustained by VC cash anymore -- Microsoft is buying the company.
Sure the collaboration features are also valuable. It also isn't obvious that they require centralization. One could argue that only a centralizing organization could extract the rents that could underwrite developing those features, but such an argument only goes so far.
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The problem solved by Github's centralization was establishing a namespace, which could have been done in several other ways. (In fact there are a number of other namespaces orthogonal to Github's but pointing at largely the same resources.) The problem Github solved that convinced lots of OSS people to use it was a reliable offsite that was free as in beer and less obnoxious than Sourceforge. So far it seems like some combination of VC cash and paid usage sustains Github's free service, and several other firms' free services as well. The centralization bit doesn't seem so important.
It's a lot more than just a reliable offsite -- it invented collaboration features that didn't exist in pure Git. Github's pull request and code review workflow has become pervasive in the industry.
It's also not sustained by VC cash anymore -- Microsoft is buying the company.
Sure the collaboration features are also valuable. It also isn't obvious that they require centralization. One could argue that only a centralizing organization could extract the rents that could underwrite developing those features, but such an argument only goes so far.