An open letter of gratitude to GitHub
 <i>Before 2007, the way to participate in Open Source was fragmented. Each project had their own workflow, patches circulated in emails, issues were reported in a myriad ways, and if anyone wanted to contribute they had to figure out every project&#x27;s rules.<p>Then, a handful of guys took the challenge to build an awesome platform and as a consequence of their hard work, their platform earned its hegemony.</i><p>Two things stand out in this &quot;thank you Github&quot; open letter:<p>1. While the situation improved tremendously in certain areas the way to participate in Open Source is still very much fragmented. Most of the major open source projects (like Linux, Mozilla, Apache and nginx, to name a few) still have their own workflows, patches are still circulated in emails and issues are still being reported in a myriad ways. Despite of the big visibility GitHub has among the new open source projects we are very far from not being fragmented.<p>2. Before 2007 we had, for instance, SourceForge that back then had also earned its hegemony and, for a series of reasons (one of them being too late to answer to the community wants and needs) lost its way, its hegemony and its user base.<p>There is time for praise and time for hard work and, IMO, the &quot;Dear Github&quot; open letter is a constructive way to call attention to the perceived problems while the &#x27;Dear &quot;Dear Github&quot;&#x27; and this gratitude letter are dismissive to their concerns (the former) and mostly empty praise and adulation (the later).