Free Knowledge Culture Calendar/February 8

Today in 2008 GitHub was founded. The platform was based on Git, which was relatively new at the time. It was intended to make merging individual code contributions, and thus distributed development, less complicated. It was hyped already before Github. Github combined the command-line tool with a graphical user interface and continuous integration tools and successfully marketed itself as a convenient all-in-one service that enabled a smoother software development workflow. This goes hand in hand with the trend towards liberal licensing (= non-Copyleft, mostly MIT), emphasizing frictionless license compatibility rather than freedom values. So much so that some years-long contributors of highly visible Open Source projects state that they “really had no idea what Open Source was” (Jacob Thornton, Bootstrap). Code sharing became a kind of natural default, and stripped of ideology; FLOSS became more about its productivity benefits than user rights.