I have a draft blog post swirling around this exact topic (but not refined enough to publish yet). I think the key thing is I (personally) don't want a NEW GitHub. I want GitHub to be better.
For example:
- GitHub issues should be as beautiful and good as Linear
- GitHub PRs should be as good as Graphite
- GitHub Git infra should be as fast/minimal as Pierre
- GitHub wikis should be more like Notion
- GitHub discussions & shouldn't exist (multiple "better issue" providers including Linear show why)
- etc.
I'm not saying to clone those full companies outright, but their core product, arguably the core features, aren't even 2% as good as those external products. Maybe aim for 10% to start.
There's the "oh no there's so much tech debt" argument. And I'm sure GH is on an absolutely mountain of tech debt. That's why in my prior twoots I've argued to just make them separate products to start only for agility reasons, unapologetically do not integrate with "old github." Net net startups beat encumbants all the time for reasons.
That's just a product/technical POV though. GitHub also has a huge PR/marketing problem. They talk through corp speak, their marketing pages (e.g. the dot com) speaks to multiple personas confusingly, they have no singular visionary to look up or trust, they have nobody who makes the outward community feel seen.
There's so much more here...
I think for the human side, GitHub already has what it needs to be really, really, really good. It really feels like they just like fearless vision, and the courage/power to say "fuck you" to a whole lot of things that are distracting them.