In 2008, three developers--Chris Wanstrath, PJ Hyett and Tom Preston-Werner--launched an online project to simplify code sharing on the Web. GitHub took its name from git, the distributed version control system created by Linus Torvalds. By the time it got going, GitHub already had plenty of competition, including SourceForge, GoogleCode and CodePlex. But the new upstart has quickly caught up. The