Item: GitHub
Rating: 10
Author: Stephen Bussey

Overall Satisfaction with GitHub

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The entire engineering and product organization has logins to GitHub and uses it to develop all of our software and even some of our processes (through Wikis). The big problem it solves is source control centralization for the organization, with the largest use case being code pull requests for all new code that goes into production.

Pros and Cons

Pros

The pull request system is very easy and intuitive to use. New engineers, even that don't use GitHub otherwise, can quickly get up and running with it.
GitHub makes the cross between private/public very easy, but also protected. It's not possible for an employee to take a private repo public without manager / admin approval.
GitHub has pretty good uptime for such a core business tool. they've had some issues, but that's generally expected over time.

Cons

Some setup around private keys has been confusing over time. An account and project cannot have the same private key added, so it can be difficult to migrate from a single bot repo to multiple.
Native integration with other tools like Jira for the project flow could make it more likely for a development team to be able to switch between the two.

Return on Investment

There's not many negative impacts I can think of for GitHub. It does what it does well. If it goes down, it can make deployments not possible. however, this is very rare

Alternatives Considered

Gitlab and Bitbucket

The biggest downside for other products is that the open source community just isn't there. The critical mass is in GitHub and this is very important for any public projects or public contributions.

Likelihood to Recommend

I generally would recommend GitHub for any source control needs, outside of extreme situations like very large organizations (multiple thousand developers) where I do not have experience. For any organization that needs good control of source code, and that interfaces with public open source projects, it's very recommended.

If an organization is entirely private and has no open source interaction, other tools may work better. Such as on-premise source control.

Comments

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GitHub: dependable, predictable, worthwhile source control