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…
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
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
Microsoft embraced github by buying it. They extended the features and ease of use to where it’s the primary website people use for sharing and collaborating on code. Now it extinguishes any alternative.
It already was the primary code sharing place though… that’s why they bought it.
Embrace extend extinguish is a well known pattern microslop uses to kill open source alternatives. You’re right it was already big which is why they embraced it (we’re both agreeing here) all I’m saying is they make sure it’s impossible to develop an alternative due to network effects and vendor default lock in. “Embrace extend extinguish” is From their own internal communications found during discovery.