I love the simplicity of static sites, and for a while now I've been meaning to play around with creating a CMS-like interface for allowing content editors to edit a Jekyll site in a markdown repository.

Then I found Netlify CMS and it looked like you'd solved the exact problem I was interested in - providing an admin area as a single-page application, where users can authenticate through OAuth and then edit the pages in a CMS interface, committing back to the repository when changes are saved.

But after looking into it for a while, I've found that actually the solution provided is rather unsatifying, because in fact I need to use Netlify as my OAuth backend for this to work (even if I can it to be a proxy user-management to GitHub). I can't simply let my users authenticate with GitHub.

From #37:

Currently the GitHub backend depends on netlify's Authentication Provider system ...
We do want to see other OAuth services enabled as well so there's no dependency on netlify.

This significantly complicated the problem space, by adding in a dependent service. For most users, this seems like an unnecessary complication.

My question is, is there a good reason why the Netlify CMS didn't implement the much more obvious solution first, and authenticate directly with GitHub? This must surely have been the first thing that would have occurred to anyone trying to solve this problem. Is there a technical limitation with GitHub's OAuth API that prevents this? Or has it simply been done this way to support Netlify's pricing model by encouraging people to use Netlify as a service?