I was recently reading the Fast Company 50 Most Innovative Companies 2013 list and agreed with many of their choices but one caught my attention. Github appeared (which I strongly agree with) but Fast Company put the reason into the words that I could not think of. They said "For speeding up the pace of software development". I think that this very accurately describes what Github has done in a few short years. They have benefited by the growing adoption of Git and they have been able to totally supplant SourceForge. There are a number of issues associated with their "freeing up" open source even more but their influence is very positive and I think outweighs other concerns about their model. In the end all that matters is results and they definitely have delivered.