&gt; clever remarks about how Git is distributed but we&#x27;re all depending on GitHub for so much that we defeat the purpose<p>Yeah, but they&#x27;d be wrong about that purpose.<p>Distributed systems used by people (eg. email, BitTorrent) always have their major hubs (Gmail, The Pirate Bay). That&#x27;s understandable: no product reaches critical mass without a main stream. The strength of a distributed system isn&#x27;t that it has no points of failure: it&#x27;s that, in the event of a significant failure in an established node (eg. TPB&#x27;s downtime at the end of 2014), the community can retarget around a new solution (eg. KickassTorrents) at the point in which the inconvenience of the downtime outweighs the inconvenience of switching habits, without a significant dip in service associated with the switch.<p>In contrast, a truly centralized system like BitKeeper would just outright <i>block</i> progress if the central node were to deny access (which was, of course, the purpose that led to devs like Linus Torvalds changing their focus for a few months, so they they could scale back to full kernel production as they constructed a workable alternative, in Git).