> Why wouldn't they just install git on their server?
That's easy, and it's about 5% of the functionality which GitHub provides. Even if you're working entirely in private, the tools you'd have to build yourself to do code review, CI/CD, package management, security updates, etc. are a significant amount of work and that's before you get to things like Codespaces.
Code review itself is a big deal in terms of the complexity of the UI for managing reviews but I’d also be surprised if they didn’t use anything else. Linting and other static analysis checks, reporting CI results, etc. are quite powerful and less work than setting the equivalent infrastructure up yourself.
> about 5% of the functionality which GitHub provides
Are you sure? I can’t even use “go to file” on GitHub and stay on a selected ref, I can’t bisect and gob help me if I need to rebase before closing a PR. I made a comment elsewhere in this conversation that I think I might use 5% of git functionality. I like GitHub, but if I can’t use even that on their site I’m having a hard time imagining they provide ~20x value over git as underlying functionality.
There are a handful of deep Git features like rebase or bisect which GitHub doesn’t expose but those aren’t things most people use frequently. Git has no equivalent for the things people do use all of the time: the issue tracking system, code review with all sorts of rules and approvals, the CI/CD system, package management for manage languages, not to mention newer features like Codespaces.
That’s a ton of features which cause people to use services like GitHub or GitLab, and it’s not like you’re giving up any of the CLI functionality to do so. My point wasn’t that these services are perfect but rather that there’s way more to it than setting up a Linux box you can push to.
I don’t disagree with anything you’re saying other than the relative scale of what each provides. Like I said, I like GitHub. I just think it adds less to git than git adds to it. And most of their features are great, but I’d sure rather a nice distributed interface to bisect than an IDE in browser or issue forums (which are useful too!).
That's easy, and it's about 5% of the functionality which GitHub provides. Even if you're working entirely in private, the tools you'd have to build yourself to do code review, CI/CD, package management, security updates, etc. are a significant amount of work and that's before you get to things like Codespaces.