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?

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.

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