It’s such a good idea that it’s strange nobody thought of it sooner. Create a site where all the geeks in the land can host their code and easily work on one another’s projects. Make it one-click to send patches to anyone. Free for open source apps; paid for closed source. Profit!

Github makes it so easy to collaborate on an open source project, it’s downright ridiculous.

Here is the old way: you find a piece of code that works and eventually find a way to improve it. If you are feeling especially generous, you share your piece of code back to the original project. You stumble through mailing list archives, create a diff patch, get hold of people, open a ticket and wait for stuff to happen with your contribution.

Github flips this around. You fork any project you want to work on (a fork means your very own version of the project). Use this fork as if you were using the real thing: but you add your changes to the fork. When a new version is released, you update your fork so you always stay current.

But the beauty is: with one click you can send your changes back to the original project. They receive a handy email, can browse your changes online, click one button and your code is merged! This is exactly what happened with my changes to the Globalite project. And the best part is ‘teh social’: you can interact with the coders directly, some of them very high-level people. Me likey.