The community contribution concepts in git are great, but it is confusing to then mention GitHub: their modus operandi is to provide tooling to make things easier that are only hard if you insist on misusing git as if it were Subversion (by for example having a single centralized repository with multiple committers, requiring complex and annoying access control and public key management). If someone had built tooling like GitHub around Subversion and then encouraged use of svk (note the "k"; this was a replacement client for Subversion that supported offline operation and had better merging support, but which worked with any svn server), things would have felt much more reasonable before; the irony is that if you follow the actual git workflow used by Linus for Linux (where everyone has their own repository, rather than at best their own branch and at worst trying to share master), you shouldn't even need any of that for git :/.