&gt; The package system for the rust language actually relies on github, as many found out during outage.<p>This is not quite correct (although close to it). Cargo doesn&#x27;t rely on GitHub, but it expects that there is some publicly-accessible git repository from which it can pull the source for any crate, and most crates use GitHub. So it&#x27;s not a particular choice of Cargo, but a side-effect of GitHub&#x27;s popularity in the community, and the fact that Cargo does not host source code itself.