Real, normal people? I wish it were true but in my experience github is just another source code repository.
As for BSD a search of my (partial) ports tree finds 19326 Makefiles of which 102 contain the string github. Thats 0.5 percent, which tends to argue against your claim.
That's just the easiest measure I have at hand. Would be interested in others and their findings.
It's been a few years since I've been a regular (Free)BSD user, but I think github has a very different use case.
The ports tree is for handling distribution of compilable/installable software for the platform, and you synch it from a server, then build. It's not really intended to promote the branching and modification, and social aspects that github does.
I largely agree with your points about branching but less so about modification. It's easy to submit patches though they do go through a sometimes rigorous code review. Does github have a formal mechanism for code reviews? Does that differ from Sourceforge, Google Code or other source repositories <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open_source_softw...?
