Especially with organizations being free (for open source projects at least), I think this usage will increase for github.
As for Zed main argument, I am not sure it is the whole story. I think the launchpad vision is great, but the delivery mostly a failure. The fundamental idea of being able to track downstream bugs in a project sounds really right to me, but launchpad UI is really a big mess: you need a lot of hoop to get the code. Sure, you can do lp:foo for project foo, but few people know bzr, and for a long time, there were numerous issues between different incompatible bzr versions (which have been fixed ever since I think). Forcing people to use bzr has been one cause of failure I think.
I also wonder how much differences can be attributed to how the things came to life: launchpad wanted to do many things from the start, wherease github grew organically.
I don't think the launchpad UI is a mess, if you don't expect to be able to browse code in it. The code browsing is horrible. But, the PPA, branch tracking, bug tracking, and other stuff is great.
I can tell you from personal experience though that github's bug tracking is stupid as all hell. Remember that whole blow-up over my book and people turning one damn bug into a massive flame war? That all happened because I couldn't figure out how to contact the project owner directly and figured the bug was the best way to do it. Little did I know that this would turn into a massive idiot festival with no way to turn the damn bug or emails off.
So, I disagree, launchpad's UI is only broken if you're into code. Github's is broken if you're into projects. Too bad they both can't just make both use cases a nice experience.
i think the odds of the github folks figuring out projects are far greater than the launchpad folks sorting out code (or proper whitespace and padding, for that matter).
that said, i do think that launchpad has some excellent attributes, like a bug tracker that doesn't make me want to defenestrate its author.
I agree that github's bug tracker is quite limited (for some reasons that I cannot pin point, bug tracking seems really hard to do: that's the only example I can think of of a fundamental part of any developer toolbox that has no great open source implementation).
As for launchpad UI, code browsing is indeed the worse part, but I find the whole thing difficult to understand. For example, we created a page for scipy quite some ago (https://launchpad.net/~scipy), and still today, there is no hierarchy in the information. For example, where can I download the software(and I do mean the releases, binaries if possible) ? A lot of the UI space is spent to convince me to subsribe to the project, or give me information that I really do not care about if I just want to use or install the damn thing for my users if I am an admin.
Also, stuff like email UI to subscribe/create bug has been horrible for a long time in launchpad(I have not checked recently, maybe it has been fixed).
As for Zed main argument, I am not sure it is the whole story. I think the launchpad vision is great, but the delivery mostly a failure. The fundamental idea of being able to track downstream bugs in a project sounds really right to me, but launchpad UI is really a big mess: you need a lot of hoop to get the code. Sure, you can do lp:foo for project foo, but few people know bzr, and for a long time, there were numerous issues between different incompatible bzr versions (which have been fixed ever since I think). Forcing people to use bzr has been one cause of failure I think.
I also wonder how much differences can be attributed to how the things came to life: launchpad wanted to do many things from the start, wherease github grew organically.