Important open source projects should not use GitHub (2020)

I don't believe there's any major harm in using Github for most projects.

Maintaining my own servers and chasing ideological purity doesn't improve my project. Any time I dedicate to setting up infrastructure is time I'm not dedicating to making the code better.

The nature of Git means Microsoft can't really do much harm. Every developer and contributor has a copy of the repo, should the worst happen setting up home elsewhere isn't that difficult. But until it is, why spend time on it?

> The nature of Git means Microsoft can't really do much harm.

Famous last words

My thoughts as well. Microsoft is just one of the companies, Google is no better either. Any OSS component could be bought and made non free, any free project provided by Google etc could change the licence and prevent you from using it, similar happened recently.

I think it is great that people use GitHub as it has a low barrier of entry, if anything happens the stuff can quickly be moved elsewhere. Until then we can piggyback on the free platform. Using some other company does not make it immediately safer anyway.

The challenge here is more about archiving, especially those rarely used repos. In any case GH is safe as MS is focussing more on AI now and they do not have a good alternative to GitHub to think about turning it off like Skype yet.

> Maintaining my own servers

You could just use codeberg. But you immediately had to jump to the most difficult alternative.

The CI stuff and the fact that you can't really export bugreports and similar things are their lock in.

I think this works, but if you use their wiki, issue, actions etc. Its going to be harder to migrate off of it.

Basically avoid the vendor lockin functionality.

Especially when a huge portion of GitHub is not Git (wiki, discussions, issues, ci...)

Also the fact that all your team knows how to use is Github pull requests, and they will whine like crazy if you move to a different model.

yup. If we were using fossil I’d agree more, but git is code exclusively, which is not actually much in a project.

Good news! Codeberg has pull requests!

> I don't believe there's any major harm in using Github for most projects.

Actually there was one mentioned in a different post. You're at the mercy of Microsoft (and random US sanctions) not only for your project, where you have a copy of the source and are the canonical source for further updates, but also for your dependencies.

at this point it feels like github is becoming a social network for developers

Give it a few more years and we'll have LinkedIn-like developer feeds.

Codeberg is only for Foss projects thou

Why do you give away nightmarish ideas for free ?

Did you even read the title of the article? Let alone the content…

The wikis are backed by git repos, i just moved my project wiki from GitHub to self-hosted, took just minutes

Issues and PR comments are another story though

Issues and PR are covered in git-bug bridges, easily mirrored to other forges. But since all other forges still suck compared to github, everybody uses github.