Episode Details

Before GitHub, contributing to open source meant emailing a patch file to a stranger and hoping they'd respond — maybe. In this episode, we trace the journey from SourceForge's project directories and CVS checkouts to the social coding revolution that made the pull request the default way the world writes software. We explore the BitKeeper crisis that drove Linus Torvalds to create Git, the pragmatic outsiders who built GitHub, and how forking went from an act of hostility to the first step of collaboration. This is the story of how open source went from ideological niche to the infrastructure of the modern internet.