Sure, I know a lot of projects have been on GH since before MS bought it, but they’ve owned it for quite a while now, so we really should be seeing better migration out by now, no?
Codeberg is nonprofit which seems more in the spirit of the Linux ecosystem overall. GH is for-profit…
It’s disappointing yet unsurprising to read the recurring answers, namely :
- cost
- incumbency
precisely because it’s absolutely avoidable and a well known strategy. It’s so well known that it’s precisely why Micro$lop bought Github in the first place. People are there and the free tiers is enough to get the long tail.
Meanwhile since that strategy happened people who consider smart enough should know the genuine cost behind this : it’s a TRAP. Plain and simple, you get there and you get STUCK there.
So… yes it takes some sweat and even some money to leave the trap … but if you care about freedom, as most free software or open-source developers might, then it’s aligned with your value.
Free CI/CD
For some people, they don’t actually care about the politics of FOSS; they want a portfolio for employers.
A friend of mine sees using GitHub as microslop paying reparations to open source.
Right, like how Micro$lop :
- blocked repository search without login (while it worked before the acquisition)
- pushed in the most traditional Micro$lop fashion for its own product, e.g. Copilot, with in product ads
- use repositories as ways to feed its own set of products, e.g. Azure for OpenAI, in order to push for code generation while ignoring licenses
and all the other things (please feel free to make this list more comprehensive) as “reparations”?
It’s the same old "Embrace, extend, and extinguish " (EEE) scheme they’ve been (sadly successfully) running for decades now.
Why aren’t all the reddit users over here yet? Consolidation and ease of use. Big number make brain happy.
Lazyness? Its why Amazon is such a success. Too difficult to do online search. Amazon is convinient.
You are mistaken, they all are, what’s left is bots talking between them
If you think github is unstable you haven’t tried codeberg. It’s down multiple times every day.
GitHub has been around for nearly 2 decades and was largely considered a mostly good thing until maybe the past couple of years. Also important to add that Microsoft seems to mostly have left it alone for the first couple of years (possibly with the exception of Atom, which it left very alone)
In addition to people just generally being slow to change, changing can take quite a bit of effort for some projects for varying reasons. Many of those same projects struggle to keep up with the maintenance workload, so they’re not going to jump at the chance to add more work to their plates.
Finally, some people just don’t care. For instance, the MIT license being popular is pretty hard evidence that FOSS doesn’t necessarily mean anti-corporate, and for many users GitHub still more or less does what it says on the tin.
Though I will say if the service disruptions and ad-injection bullshit continue you’ll only see GitHub competitors grow. GitLab seems to be going after their enterprise customers with some success.
Open Source projects get lots of free features for being on GitHub. Nobody else is beating that offering at current.
Like many other social media sites it’s partially network effects.
It’s probably majority network effects. If you compare Instagram to 5, 10 years ago on the dot, you see an atrocious drop off on quality and usability. The change was so insidious, majority of people didn’t notice or care all that much. And yet, Instagram is still one of the largest platforms in the US, despite how objectively horrendous it is to users.
Github was around for a long time before MS bought it.
I don’t move mine because of the hard limits at 100 repos and 100 MB of private storage. I wouldn’t mind paying to have more, but that’s not an option.
edit: it seems one can request limit increases, but I have no idea what’s their approval criteria.
people have tried.
people predicted the enshittification of GitHub as soon as the acquisition was announced, as you can imagine. now, picture yourself as a dev in that month where a small vocal userbase is reading tea leaves based on Microsoft’s past behavior telling you to move your project, where the best outcome is nothing changes, to a new platform. you have a hundred issues and a dozen PRs in review, and those won’t stop coming in while you are migrating. now you need to mirror your project on GitHub, unless you want to immediately fade into obscurity, because while you’re spending your valuable time making sure everything is setup as it was but now on GitLab (the only realistic alt at the time), issues and PRs are still coming in, and you have to keep your releases updated in GitHub for a while during the migration. you also need to figure out CI/CD on your new platform.
so the ideal—that you can migrate and nothing changes—is a pipe dream. your packaging is now likely totally different; you’re now that snowflake project in the config where i had to figure out how to point to something other than GitHub and waste 30min questioning whether i need your tool at all. you still continue to get PRs and issues through GitHub because of course they didn’t read the README. and there’s tiny friction everywhere. the UI is different, how OAuth is handled is different, the plug and play you got from GitHub Actions is gone, etc etc.
meanwhile for 6 years things are chugging along fine at GitHub: Actions is getting better, Treesitter support, better UI for PRs.
it’s the AI stuff that’s ruining GitHub no doubt. not the AI itself but the culture around it with the “what is our team doing with AI?” nonsense corporate policy. it’s all happened really quickly, and isn’t the “boiled frog” scenario at all really.
Linux was around before GitHub, and wherever we end up as long as we still have our Unix tools like git it’ll be fine.
ideals are great. the perfect is the enemy of the good
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