So BitBucket and Gitorious and others will need to excel and beat GitHub at their game. Competition will eventually solve this the same way we aren't beholden to the same methods and sites we used 10 years ago. The next winner may not even exist yet and I expect that the barriers to entry here are not nearly as high as those in other markets that have been disrupted over the last few years.
GitHub has already won due to networking effects. It's like trying to unseat Facebook as the dominant social network. It will require a sea change in technology used for version control or sharing code.
We've seen other, similar, widely-used platforms lose prominence rather quickly. SourceForge and Google Code are two such examples (both of which also support Git these days). I see no reason why GitHub would be immune from such forces.
This is the key. Also, people need to remember that "better," in the case of taking over market leader position, means that the value add of the improvement must be > the benefits of using the market leader. This is a higher bar than simply newProductX > marketLeader.
Git wasn't the first version control system. It won because people liked it best. If something better emerges (by better, I don't mean slightly better, but something where value_over_Github > switching_cost, which is often missed when people discuss what is "better" than the current leader), it will replace it
The competition you describe exists now. Having a new "winner" won't change the point being made in the article. I don't agree with the conclusion he came to, but he's pointing out issues with there being a winner whose site is the de facto place where code / project / people go.
> he's pointing out issues with there being a winner whose site is the de facto place where code / project / people go.
That's likely true. However, it ignores whether or not those issues are outweighed by the substantial benefits to a de facto place that everyone goes, which are generally very large.
