Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

Why GitHub? If they truly cared about open-source they would've chosen something else, such as a self-hosted Forgejo [1], or its most common public instance Codeberg [2].

[1] https://forgejo.org/ [2] https://codeberg.org/

> If they truly cared about open-source

Perhaps Microsoft offered to pick up the tab that Google has been paying, but is now imperiled, or at least lend some sort of financial support, and Firefox cares more about paying their bills than open source

Codeberg unfortunately have an abysmal uptime track record.

I would argue that part of "truly caring" about open-source is being where the contributors and community are. That's probably a large part of the move to GitHub, and neither of these other options would achieve that. As much as one can say "git is distributed, the server doesn't matter", the centre of the community very much does matter, and for better or worse that's currently Github.

Probably only for visibility. Or MS is in the process of sponsoring them.

If they truly cared about open source they would have hosted their own git on a run down pentium 2 in a nerds basement, never washed, and spent most of their time complaining online.

To assert that an organisation doesn't "truly" care about open source simply because they've chosen a tool that isn't is ridiculous.

Even before this Mozilla almost certainly used hundreds of closed source tools, including things like Slack, Excel, Anaplan, Workday, etc.

> MS is in the process of sponsoring them.

Think you might be on something, with the incoming end of Google cash flow, Firefox may be in discussion with bing and that could be part of the agreement, use Microsoft server.

I maintain some project on all forges in parallel, even savannah. Savannah is even the default. But 99% of all reports and contributions are on the github mirror, 1% on savannah, 0% on gitlab and 0% on codeberg. Nobody cares about those islands.

issues are stored in git bug and automatically synced. Github is the only viable option, but you can keep the others as mirrors when github chooses to strike you.

Considering image backlash they had over last year with: acquiring ad tech company created by former meta people, which in turn lead to introducing so-called "privacy preserving attribution" feature for ads tracking, changing ToS terms regarding data collection, firing CPO who was diagnosed with cancer. Then I do believe these all little changes are PR stunts with an attempt to regain trust of users who strongly criticised Mozilla in last year and earlier.

They should restructure instead, hire people who actually want to work on software and not use corporation and foundation around it as platform for their... peculiar "endeavours". But I doubt that's gonna happen - flow of Google cash and from all those naive people who think supporting Mozilla directly contributes to Firefox is too good it seems. But then it's understandable they do this - money from Google tap can get twisted.

If you maintain a popular project, you'll quickly find that github prs are a massive source of spam and low quality prs with people that don't even bother to follow up.

Bad PRs all around, with just a constant stream of drive by "why no merge?!?!?!" comments.

Using proprietary software in-house for management is one thing, forcing outside contributors to use them, another. That is why they went out of their way to avoid Slack when the time came to leave IRC behind and they chose Matrix instead.

We need to work on decentralisation of git forges, making it less relevant where a project is hosted by offering cross-instance collaboration and discoverability.