Why Remote for Github is named “origin” instead of “github”

Question

I'm new to GIT and github and confused as to why the standard remote name is origin instead of github.

Why not just use "github" instead of "origin" for the remote name?

Answer 1

Github is just a company that hosts git repositories. Git is a tool that can be used on with whatever repository host you want. There are alternatives to github, although github is certainly the most popular repository host.

Origin is the default name for a remote Git repository. This means what when you look up documentation online for how to use git commands and find something like git push origin master, it just works regardless of whether it's on Github, Bitbucket, or a self-hosted server. If this were not the case, all documentation would become more complex as it would as it would need to tell users how to figure out what the remote is named by their repo hosting provider, then how to do the actual command.

Answer 2

Probably because you also get origin as remote name when you just git clone a repository.