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…
EDIT: All right, all right, I’ve gotten schooled. Thank you, O wise ones; I didn’t realize how much Microsoft literally depends on Linux, among other things. I will proceed to shut up.
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.
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.
I’m pretty sure that MIT license is that popular out of ignorance, instead of an informed decision to allow corporate to steal and make money out of their code.
I’d like to think that is so but some here will argue non-copyleft licenses are “more free”. Ime they don’t reply after I point out that’s the freedom to deny others freedom.
It’s freedom nonetheless.
Widen the scope to consider downsteam users (the dev’s user’s users and beyond) and now the potential lack of any software freedom makes it freedom muchtheless.
So you want to restrict dev’s freedom to choose whichever license they want?
I prevent others from relicensing my works under less-free licenses or making them non-free by using Copyleft/share-a-like licenses.
I’ve known people IRL who talk about the GPL like it’s a virus infecting your code
Atom is back to life, kinda, there’s a fork of it called Pulsar that’s actually really pretty good
Open Source projects get lots of free features for being on GitHub. Nobody else is beating that offering at current.
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
Ha, if only that were the truth. I keep preaching over there and telling people to check out /r/RedditAlternatives, at least, so I like to think that I’ve moved at least one person over, which makes it all worthwhile.
Momentum and time and effort to migrate.
And there’s automated workflows such as GitHub Actions and ci/cd integrations that don’t have 1-to-1 replacements, which would mean extra work (for quite strained teams of volunteers)
Additionally, as a developer on a large open source project, the community is already established on GitHub. It would be incredibly risky to move it and hope everyone comes along.
Gentoo moved: https://www.gentoo.org/news/2026/02/16/codeberg.html
Good for them, still, it’s risky, they just decided it was worth the risk
I moved my projects and yes I had to make new runners and pipelines for forgejo but it’s pretty much feature parity
Good for you, guess your setup is less complicated then.
There’s still plenty of stuff that is not a 1-to-1 drop in replacement, e.g. plenty use build previews from netlify, they have no drop-in for other providers so to get those you have to directly interact with the API instead, in a runner
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.
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You seem to think that the idea is that linux and most FOSS projects are some carebear nonprofit charity organization. You are wrong.
In most cases the idea is that open source work is there because it is easier to share technological progress if multiple companies work at it. And because of this it is just better than the alternative. The linux kernel is worked on by multiple large corporations that are in the business of making money using servers. If these servers run better then they make more money. To make them run better for them they need to implement their features and because of the licence and the ecosystem they need to publish these modifications back to the upstream.
All this works so good because a lot of companies make a lot of money with it.
Github will be used as long as it does not interfere with the workflow or with the legal aspects, nobody cares about the spirit nearly as much as you think
Fair, but what about the Copilot-pockmarking? And they’re always one step away from a paywall… Why wait until it gets that bad versus at least duplicating elsewhere now?
Worth noting that the Linux source is updated and collaborated with via email, not GitHub. The Linux repo on GitHub is a read-only mirror.
Aye, but that’s not true of the Linux OS’s based on it
Plenty of companies are quite happy to pay for github licenses
All these projects for sure are cloned on multiple backups, if something happens and github is no longer viable it is a minimal effort to clone the source code and bug tracking and move it somewhere else. Serious projects will have contingenties in place for this, lesser projects will do what the big guys do
For some people, they don’t actually care about the politics of FOSS; they want a portfolio for employers.
Did you download the source code? It’s on GitHub. It’s literally on GitLab. It’s on Bitbucket with ads. It’s literally on SourceForge. You can probably find it on Savannah. Dude it’s on Azure DevOps. It’s a Codeberg project. It’s on Gitea. You can download it on Gitea. You can go to Gitea and download it. Log into Gitea right now. Go to Gitea. Dive into Gitea. You can Gitea it. It’s on Gitea. Gitea has it for you. Gitea has it for you.
Is that pron. “gih-tee” or “gih-tee-uh?”
That’s kind of the point of git
Serious answer: technical inertia and legacy reasons and most people don’t want to bother migrating established projects.
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.
Yeah, this is why I doubled this post on Reddit as well… though I keep encouraging people to check out Lemmy!
It was independent (not under Microsoft) until late 2018, and moving is hard. Even after MS bought it, they tried to keep it independent. It’s really only been the last few years where it’s gone downhill.
It’s also kinda the defacto standard for git hosting due to being a solid early player in the space. I assume that view will change as Codeberg and other rivals get more ingrained in the open source stack.
I believe the core reason is that, when MS bought it, and while they make it worse day by day, the number of projects in Github was already huge and it just keeps growing. That being said, it is still the main platform to find FOSS projects, and to have your project be found.
A lot of people are migrating though. The good thing about the FOSS community and philosophy is that they don’t really need to rely on shitty companies like Microsoft. They can (and many actually do) just move on, at least regarding their own personal projects.
Amuy new projects are codeberg. But github has a default 10gb repo space. Imagine everyone suddenly wants that on codeberg, the cost alone would force them to shut down or have other forms of income than donations.
I didn’t know the repo space was that different. That does play a factor in all this…
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.
