I've always found Github's business model interesting. What if a massive open-source organization (e.g. Fedora, Apache) decided to use it for all of their development, integrating it with continuous builds and all the associated pulls. Of course this isn't likely to happen for a number of reasons, but there are large open source projects that could put a significant load on their infrastructure if they chose to use Github as their main code versioning system.
It's the same business model that Jira used in the past, when the alternatives were Mantis, Trac and Bugzilla. They had[1] one of the better and well designed issue trackers, free for OSS projects. That turned into a great way to champion adoption within paying customers' organizations.
[1] In my opinion, they have since lost that edge on the UI.
I remember seeing this new much improved UI for bug tracking on OSS, and thinking, "Thank goodness they're no longer using Bugzilla". And then using it a bit, and thinking, "I've got to get that bug tracker into the org I'm working for." Yep, it was Jira. It was a great strategy they used!
Sure but it's just the kernel, and that's just a mirror. Linus does not use Github to manage kernel development. In fact he's been vitriolic in the past about how Github does pull requests.
I wonder how much traffic the Github Linux repo gets. Seems to me that people who want to use Linux, will go get a distro instead. And people who want to develop the kernel, will follow the kernel development process (which doesn't rely on Github).
For a period of time when Kernel.org was breached, GitHub was the repository for Linux. [1] I remember reading a review of GitHub by him shortly after. He did not like how Pull Requests or patches worked on GitHub. I'd link it but I'm having trouble finding it.
I think they should do 'ok' though it won't make you wealthy:
- They collect money from businesses (who pay quite well)
- They collect money from private repos (like I have for lots of my config files, no, no passwords/keys in there ;) for e.g. tex files.
- The large companies probably pay some form of 'support'
