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.

  • Ŝan • 𐑖ƨɤ@piefed.zipEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    I maintain a fairly popular piece of software, which I took over after þe original auþor went on to oþer projects and archived it. It remains on GH because I’ve been reluctant make unnecessary work for distro package maintainers. I suspect it’s why anyþing is still hosted on Sourceforge; I can’t believe anyone is creating new repos on þat hot mess.

  • DFX4509B@lemmy.wtfEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Also, what if MS or the government starts getting hostile and taking down Linux and other FOSS repos they don’t like?

    • BartyDeCanter@piefed.socialEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Remember that Git is a distributed VCS, so no git repo is dependent on a central server. Everything else about the project might be heavily dependent on GH, but any active developer is going to have a full copy of the code with history on their main workstation.

      That being said, it highly depends on the project, but I’d put it into a few buckets.

      1. Un/barely maintained projects - This is by far the largest number of repos, and many of them are used as dependencies by all sorts of projects. The truly unmaintained ones would vanish, and I bet most of the barely maintained ones would as well. The most important of these would probably be resurrected since their code will be sitting on all sorts of drives, but it will be a mess. Take a look at https://nesbitt.io/2026/05/08/weekend-at-bernies.html for an idea.
      2. Small individually actively maintained projects - There are a lot of these and many of them could continue to be just fine, depending on how much of the full GH feature set they use. They would lose all the PRs, wiki spaces, discussions, issues, and maybe even the project page itself that are hosted on GH. For most projects it would be an annoyance to have lost all that, but if it’s a small enough project that one person is maintaining it, it’s probably small enough to pull over to something else reasonably easily depending on how all in they are on GH tools and their use of type 1repos. And a project with only one main contributor is unlikely to fragment.
      3. Mid-sized active projects - Probably the hardest hit. A lot of these are all-in on the GH tools, particularly issues and CI. Losing that would hurt a lot because the project is big enough to really need those tools and uses them at a volume that they can’t just host on the leads laptop. These are also going to take a lot of work to set up the project infrastructure elsewhere. And this would probably be the sort of thing to push and simmering tensions to erupt, leading to fragmentation.
      4. The big projects - Probably the least hardest hit. Most of these are just using GH as a push mirror. The core team probably has a functioning private communication and governance system, their own issue tracker (even if it pulls from GH), documentation, and public discussion groups. Most of these run their own private CI. And they are the ones most likely for another host to step in and offer to help.

      So the little stuff? Probably going to be annoyed or not care a lot. The big stuff? Same thing. But that middle group would be hurt.

  • BartyDeCanter@piefed.socialEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Two main reasons: history and network effects.

    GitHub was an independent company for a decade that provided a vastly superior service to what it replaced, primarily SourceForge. And it was free for FOSS projects, while charging for closed ones.

    The improvements paid for by the closed source customers trickled out to everyone. So, it became the best place for FOSS developers, large and small. And as more people moved to GH, the more reason there was to move to it.

    Of course, it was constantly bleeding money and eventually had to do something. That ended up being selling to MS.

    There was a lot of trepidation about this, but for the first few years they not only kept their promise about supporting FOSS, but actually made it better by allowing small private repos to get many of the services that were previously gated for open FOSS or paid repos.

    And the alternatives were stil not as good, and just as importantly didn’t have the user networking that GH does.

    Now, some FOSS people are starting to look elsewhere, Codeberg, self-hosted Forgejo, and others. They have come a long way and are nearing feature parity, particularly for smallish projects. But the network effects of discovery and reputation are strong, and GH still provides a few more useful features.

    I’ve moved my private repos to self hosted Forgejo, but my public ones are still on GH as push mirrors. I’m not ready to give up the discoverability and Mac/Windows CI runners that I can get from GH for free. I hope to be able to some day, but not yet.

    • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
      0·
      2 months ago

      There was a lot of trepidation about this, but for the first few years they not only kept their promise about supporting FOSS, but actually made it better by allowing small private repos to get many of the services that were previously gated for open FOSS or paid repos.

      • They embraced! :D
      • They extended! :D
      • . . .aw, shit. :/

      I’ve only a basic understanding of using Git myself, but I think I’m gonna learn it with a self-hosted Forgejo for my Godot projects too.

      Then for the parts that don’t have feature parity, I won’t know what I’m missing, and I have no need for “iNdUsTrY sTaNdArD LeAdiNg oPtiMiZeD sYnErGyStiC wOrKfLoWs” or whatever hahaha.

      It does definitely present a conundrum if you want people to see your open source software though. Damn network effect. =\

      • BartyDeCanter@piefed.socialEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        The number one thing to remember about git is that you don’t need a full hosting service around it for basic functionality. If it’s just you, a single local repo will probably serve you just fine, maybe use a bare repo on your main machine or a Pi-level device if you like as a remote/backup. Just git init or git init --bare and you’re good to go. GitHub, Codeberg, Forgejo, and all the others exist to serve multi-contributor and/or public project-level needs.

        The number two thing to remember is that it is based around graph theory.

        • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
          0·
          2 months ago

          That’s some really helpful advice, thank you! 😃 I actually didn’t know you could just make any local folder a repo like that.

          Would a Forgejo instance still be helpful if I wanted to have “one point of truth” between multiple machines even if I’m the only dev? I already use Syncthing, but for some reason I feel like there’d be a lot of sync conflicts and stuff.

          The other main reason for wanting to learn Git, of course, is because it’s otherwise more difficult to try out changes to scripts and experiment, without finding yourself lost in the weeds and forgetting what worked last.

          My current “version control” is “copy the entire project folder before you do anything major.” 😂

          • BartyDeCanter@piefed.socialEnglish
            0·
            2 months ago

            If you just want one point of truth, the minimal version is to create a bare repo somewhere that you have ssh access to or your local machine. Then you can clone/pull/push from it.

            A bare repo is a special kind of repo meant for exactly this, but can be a bit confusing at first. A normal repo contains all of your current working files and a special .git directory that holds all the files/blobs/history that git needs to work. A bare repo is just the .git as a top directory with bare=true in its config. So you can use it as a remote, but it never has a working set. They are usually named something like my_repo.git.

            Edit:

            Here’s a basic example for setting it all up in a fully local way:

            mkdir ~/bares  
git init --bare ~/bares/my_repo.git  
mkdir ~/code  
git clone ~/bares/my_repo.git ~/code/my_repo

            And then you have remotes as your main source of truth in ~/bares and your working copies in ~/code. If you want to access from another machine that has ssh access to the first, you can do:

            mkdir ~/code  
git clone user@host:~/bares/my_repo.git ~/code/my_repo

            And then use git pull/push to keep it all in sync. Don’t use Syncthing on a git repo, it eventually goes badly.

            • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
              0·
              2 months ago

              This was really informative, thank you so much for taking the time! Definitely bookmarking this. :)

              I was looking up further why you’d use a bare repo over a standard one. Somebody said for just sharing a repo between users, “snapshots just take up unnecessary space.”

              …But would that mean you can’t roll back history? Maybe I’m ignorant on the term snapshot in Git context lol.

              But yeah, I really appreciate the post and I think that’ll get me on the right foot, to actually developing games instead of setting up yet another tool and procrastinating what I want to actually be doing anyway. 😂

              Glad my instinct was correct about not using Syncthing for this purpose. XD

              • BartyDeCanter@piefed.socialEnglish
                0·
                2 months ago

                Happy to help! And yes, I have no idea what they’re talking about. If you don’t have snapshots (commits) you don’t have version control.

                Let me know when you get your game going, I’d love to check it out. I’m working on a few myself.

    • Bogus007@lemmy.zip
      0·
      2 months ago

      Just to give some relevant information: Git, the major program behind GitHub, has been developed by Linus Torvals. The license allowed the free use of git until today. Some people took git and built a web application around - GitHub was born. Sure they added some features, but the engine was git! In 2018 these “creators” of GitHub sold their product to Microsoft. They gave a s**t on the community and what may happen afterwards.

  • Eager Eagle@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • cadekat@pawb.social
      0·
      2 months ago

      It’s hopefully common knowledge, but just in case, Codeberg is running Forgejo. You can host a compatible instance yourself! It’s not that painful.

      • screaming in digital@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        just installed forgejo on a locally hosted lxc instance on a spare qemu VM. will use primarily for my own projects and external devs who collaborate on client projects.

        doing my part to give an nvidia sized/shaped “torvalds” to ms.

        edit: love it. glad I finally pulled the trigger on this.

      • Eager Eagle@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        I know, but the main use i have for github is collaboration, and I don’t want to expose a forgejo instance I’m hosting myself.

      • Alex@lemmy.ml
        0·
        2 months ago

        Because running servers costs money. The project I work on gets donations towards it’s CI costs and it’s not insignificant.

      • BartyDeCanter@piefed.socialEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago
        1. CI runners - GH offers free CI runners for a variety of OSs. I can automatically test my code on Linux/Mac/Windows for free on GH. No one else offers that because it is very expensive. You need windows licenses and Apple hardware. And Codeberg only offers it on Linux after a back and forth discussion. Plus, while simple GH CI Actions move to Forgejo Actions pretty easily, more complex ones require a complete rewrite.
        2. Better issue tracking - FJ’s issue tracking is pretty good, and perfetcly fine for small projects, but GH’s is better.
        3. Better CLI - fj is decent and improving, but gh is better
        4. Better project pages - Codeberg Pages is decent and improving, but GH Pages are better.
        5. Lots of other small things - Codeberg is decent and improving, GH is better.

        For most people, myself included, the only thing that really matters are the CI runners. But that is also the one thing that costs the most to support.

  • thejml@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    2 months ago

    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.

  • plutopos@lemmy.zip
    0·
    2 months ago

    Arguably the biggest contributor to the Linux ecosystem is Red Hat, a for-profit company that offers its technologies to the Israeli military among other things. The biggest contributor to the Linux kernel is Red Har, while the second biggest is Meta. The Linux ecosystem is not inherently nonprofit!

  • dwt@feddit.orgDeutsch
    0·
    2 months ago

    A friend of mine sees using GitHub as microslop paying reparations to open source.

    • utopiah@lemmy.ml
      0·
      2 months ago

      Right, like how Micro$lop :

      • blocked repository search without login (while it worked before the acquisition)
      • pushed in the most traditional Micro$lop fashion for its own product, e.g. Copilot, with in product ads
      • use repositories as ways to feed its own set of products, e.g. Azure for OpenAI, in order to push for code generation while ignoring licenses

      and all the other things (please feel free to make this list more comprehensive) as “reparations”?

      It’s the same old "Embrace, extend, and extinguish " (EEE) scheme they’ve been (sadly successfully) running for decades now.

  • Xanthrax@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 months ago

    Why aren’t all the reddit users over here yet? Consolidation and ease of use. Big number make brain happy.

    • trilobite@lemmy.ml
      0·
      2 months ago

      Lazyness? Its why Amazon is such a success. Too difficult to do online search. Amazon is convinient.

        • Bogus007@lemmy.zip
          0·
          2 months ago

          Your local or regional provider can and will send you books in the same time - perhaps not in 24h, but this may be rarely the case that somebody is in a such dearly need of a book.

          I am buying books from my local provider, though more expensive, but I want people to have jobs - considering how many bookstores closed due to Amazon - and the possibility to go there, have a book in my hand and read it a bit.

        • utopiah@lemmy.ml
          0·
          2 months ago

          Doubt it, most other online stores with the same coverage do offer similar conditions.

          • sonstwas@sh.itjust.works
            0·
            2 months ago

            The difference is the wide range of products available on Amazon. I can buy 5 products from widely different areas and only pay shipping once (or maybe twice depending on availability).

            If I were to order these 5 products on 5 different stores I’d pay 5 times shipping.

        • Dymonika@lemmy.mlOP
          0·
          2 months ago

          It’s not the shipping; it’s the return policy. Amazon’s is almost impossible to beat apart from certain in-person stores like Costco or perhaps ALDI.

  • quick_snail@feddit.nl
    0·
    2 months ago

    Codeberg doesn’t offer CI dinners for macOS for free.

    It’s important if you have cross platform apps

  • P03 Locke@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    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.

  • gwl [he/him]@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    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)