Software developers demand the ability to work effectively from anywhere. They have attained a coolness factor, and demand for them is so high that there is no need for them to guard their source code like squirrels preparing for winter. GitHub is a good idea because it effectively captured what software developers really want and offered it to them pretty flawlessly. GitHub is a zeitgeist that is taking over the world precisely because software developers are taking over the world and software developers really like GitHub. (source)Although, I work at a research institute which is one half a commercial consultancy with IP to protect, on-going international research collaborations, and governmental research funding require us to be flexible, open and accessible. I work as a research scientist/analyst programmer in a science department, not in the IT or applications department, and thus, IT infrastructure interaction in commercial entities is "challenging" - for the scientists as well as for the IT folks.
In our current project we embraced the Zeitgeist now, too. For our geodata portal development and deployment processes, we adopted following paradigm:
Google Cloud Platform, Compute and Container Engine with Kubernetes as the our computational platform.
Google Drive, Google Docs and Sheets for assets, functional and implementation specifications development, user stories and use cases.
