Why is Github more popular than Gitorious?

Question

Gitorious has been around longer and the two sites seem to cover the same ground, yet a quick Google Fight shows Github almost two orders of magnitude higher.

Is there a larger distinction that I'm not aware of?

Answer 1

It could just be that more people are talking about and using Github, thus generating more traffic and popularity for it compared to Gitorious.

Answer 2

I had never heard of gitorious before this question was asked.

The answer probably lies in what projects were posted to each site, and by who. I'm sure the popularity of the software, or the developers, hosted on each site will indicate "why" github is more popular.

Answer 3

Github has grabbed a lot of attention lately due to a number of high-profile projects opting to host their code with Github. Most notably is probably Ruby on Rails, which brought it to the attention of a lot of developers already starting to try out Git. Gitorious just hasn't had that kind of exposure, and as such has not been able to attract the following that Github has.

Answer 4

Github is a project hosting AND a social network: is really easy to interact with people (by forking and submitting patches for example) on Github. Also (this is subjective) Github's layout is sexier, and that counts in this 'web 2.0' world.

Answer 5

At the moment it seems that GitHub has more features, both as a project management site (Wikis, Integration with Bugtrackers), a social networking site and a Git hosting site (all the cool graphs). There's also the fact that they rewrote the Git server in Erlang and the Git client in Ruby, which gives them much more stability than the typical commandline wrappers that other Rails-based Git repository interfaces (including Gitorious) use.

Community-driven open-source projects need to reach a certain critical mass to achieve a high velocity. The Linux kernel is likely one of the fastest developing software projects ever, but it has 500 regular contributors, about 3000 overall. Gitorious is nowhere near that.

GitHub, on the other hand, has now four (five?) full-time, paid developers working on it. Four full-time developers, that's what? 120 hours a week? Assuming that the average open-source developer has time to invest 2 hours on the weekend, that means that Gitorious would need 60 developers just to keep up with the pace of GitHub, more than that if Gitorious wants to overtake GitHub. Once they reach that critical mass, Gitorious should just blast right past GitHub in terms of features, but until then GitHub has the upper hand.

Answer 6

Github got the popular frameworks on board:

Ruby on Rails - Ruby Mootools, Prototype - Javascript Some big CMSs, PHP frameworks, etc..

Which causes most to be introduced to Git and Github together. And makes us have to learn Github in order to keep our forks of those big players.

Good graphics, decent guides, all help.

The rest is history.

Answer 7

I agree github is sexier, but gitorious is good enough for most small projects.

Gitorious being open source and being possible to install and configure to your needs is attractive.

One of the main reasons github is more popular than gitorious are the big projects using it. But now QT is open to community contributions and using gitorious (qt.gitorious).

So, Gitorious should notice a big increase in popularity. At least among KDE users.

Answer 8

OK, there's a bit of FUD being posted here which is just a result of pure ignorance, so pardon the slightly harsh tone.

As far as I know, Gitorious uses mostly the same library as github (Grit) for most things git related. We even made it faster in some cases since there where some suboptimal code in there. As far as their publically published changes to Grit go, these haven't been integrated unfortunately (I even registered on github to make them available, imagine that!). And don't think that parts of it being in pure Ruby is an advantage, in particular binary search on the commit log is a painful exercise in the slowness of ruby and not something you'd want to persue.

Last I heard they abandoned their erlang git server, due to some design flaws in it so I guess it didn't follow a fork+exec model. Speaking of which, if you actually bothered to read the source a bit to Gitorious you'd see that we run a git-daemon written in Ruby. That's ok though, since it's a fork+exec server, meaning that there's only about 80 milliseconds spent in Ruby land before it forks and execs the git-upload-pack command (and passes the socket handles over to that obviously, as per normal fork semantics).

So please Jörg, don't just blindly assume things because you may have heard some things, or just make up stuff as go. The advantage of Gitorious is that you don't even have to ponder in the first place, evidence is just a git clone away..

Anyway, I know this thread is old but someone showed it to and I just had to reply, a lot has happened and changed, for the better, with Gitorious over the past 5 months.

Answer 9

I think it's refreshing that Gitorious and Github do things differently:

• Github has a person-oriented focus, while Gitorious focuses on projects and teams
• Github offers hosting of closed source projects, while Gitorious is all FOSS
• Github's business model is based on people paying to host their private repositories, while Gitorious' business model is based on organizations wanting to involve their users in FOSS projects

I really wouldn't want my FOSS project to be hosted on a site that is itself proprietary software, but I realize that's my personal opinion.

Answer 10

From a marketing perspective, GitHub has more going for it. It's a much better and iconic name - git hub is intuitive and hard to forget - gitorious is long and awkward and doesn't say anything about what the service does. The github pages are also better designed and looks nices, which is important. And finally, they have the momentum or popularity and large products, which is very important marketing-wise. I'm sorry, Gitorious guy, but just being a technically good product isn't enough.

Answer 11

Lack of post-commit hooks with Gitorious (see Has Gitorious hooks for CIA commit notification?) is one big disadvantage compared to GitHub to me.

Answer 12

There's another class of answer - network effects. Why is the Orkut.com social network service huge in Brazil, and why was it huge in Iran? Yet fell from favour in the US and Europe? Why is Hyves.nl clinging on to social networking dominance in the Netherlands, and the once globally famous Friendster now focussed on south-east Asia? Looking for answers to these kinds of question solely in the intrinsic features of each site is missing the social aspect; people use sites that people they know use. They're popular because they're popular, and a little advantage can go a long way.

If we think of the developer demographic as a curiously non-geographical territory it might be clearer what's happening here: github is used ... because it is used. Once I crossed the threshold of having made an account there, it was very easy to follow people and projects, and drop the occasional message to a developer. I have no idea if Gitorious lets me do similar, because I've never even looked: the projects I'm interested in are more often than on on Github.I use it because others use it, not (directly) because of the social features, although they certainly add to my incentive to create an account there.

Answer 13

here is a another reason: http://gitorious.org/robots.txt

search engines cannot crawl gitorious

whereas with: http://github.com/robots.txt they can

Answer 14

I noticed everyone forgot another feature of github... Private repositories. Sure its not for open source projects BUT that means that your developers can use GITHUB at work AND at leisure all at the same time. Sorry not everyone is a full-blown os advocate. Its why I felt that Adobe FLEX2 was a flop. The only ide for it was like 500 or 1000 dollars. Nobody would use that at home, and thus no "great" projects used it because nobody was buying the IDE licenses. textmate is an exception because it is cheap and worth the price. Same here, you want to attract everyone at all times to develop on your platform vs some of the people some of the time.

Answer 15

Another point in favour of Github: Github seems to have a solid business model; I don't mind paying $7-$12 per month for its features AND the knowledge they will be around in the future still improving the site AND somebody to complain to if things don't work. Gitorious is completely free, but it seems less stable, I doubt they can reach and keep up with Github's offers while continuing to be free.

Answer 16

Answer: Github buys me a whiskey once a month.

Answer 17

It's simple. Less letters in their domain name!

Answer 18

One recent reason not mentioned here yet:

smart http transfer protocol support. (a big deal for me, as I detailed here)

GitHub has it.
Gitorious? Not so (for now)

Answer 19

It seems Gitorious is lacking even basic branch/merge graph, not to mention the clone network graph. Sure it's still usable for hosting, but that lack of visualization is a huge drawback