I run Assembla, but I will say that Github is a good service, and they do a better job with code sharing and individual repositories. Assembla is more oriented toward managing teams. This is not a move to go against Github. We still offer Github as a repository tool. You can use Assembla ticketing / collaboration / team management tools, and link them to code commits on github.

Thanks for the kind words. GitHub does have an organization/teams feature currently in beta and should be released publicly within a month or two.

Interesting, given that GitHub is several years old and has a huge user base there must be something right for GitHub to have not needed a teams feature up until now. Was this a feature that users were asking for or a feature that when watching users they would very much benefit to have?

We just turned two and folks have been asking for team support since before we launched. We've never been in the habit of building features we merely think people want.

This is the only way they will get users from GitHub.

As an Assembla user I fear they are not focusing on their core product. They have some weak areas in Assembla I wish they would focus on instead of reinventing the wheel.

I have the same concern. At Assembla, we feel that we need to work on being best of breed for repositories, and ticketing / issue management. Some of the collaboration features are not at the level of single-purpose providers, but we include them and incrementally enhance them because we think it is important to get project IP in one place. So, that is the focus that we have chosen. I am sure that we can be more focused. Please send us a note if you have specific areas of concern.

The cost of github is so small that it's not really a factor.

Why the hippies? IMO, Github is a really useful tool.

By "hippies" I presume s/he meant people working on open source.

or git users