[TheHydroImpulse]

Github has been a well known Rails monolith. Absolutely they have services that power all sorts of stuff (they have a few blog posts on it) but it's just impractical to even start a discussion on splitting it up for the reasons you initially argued for.

I've been through a number of large rewrites/reworks that took monoliths much like Github (with many many many services behind it) and split them up into modular pieces and it's an insane amount of work that can take years. You simply need very good reasons (including business reasons) to do that.

Moreover, companies at these sizes just have a LOT of code all over the place. Tooling, infra, supporting services, etc... Not to mention it's just not useful to have external contributors for a business product like Github. Doing code reviews, addressing bugs that were introduced, spending time discussing things with contributors takes an incredible amount of time.

Basically if the reason you want Github open sourced (and reworked into some weird architecture you described) is so that people can contribute to fix things and add features....Github could/will just hire more devs to work on that.

[joelhandwell]

Thinking about the fact that Github have Github.com (production service) and Github Enterprise (self hosted), could it be like this?

Github.com = Github Core + Production Services and Infra

Github Enterprise = Github Core + Services need for Self Hosting

Maybe it's not worthy to proceed based on assumption but if there is something like "Github Core" which is shared codebase between prod and self-hosted, open sourcing the core can be an option?