What would it take for you to move away from Github?
Let’s be honest, the majority here probably has a github account. Some of us are happy as a clam and wouldn’t switch no matter what happened, but there are some who would and haven’t yet. Why?
All it took for me to switch to GitLab was a larger free lfs quota which I wanted for a project. The superior webpage UI made me migrate every old project to it too.
it’s free and convenient? if there was another reliable, free git host with a polished web interface and decent cli for features like issues, sure, I’d consider moving to it. I’m not in the market though, I have other work to do
The big and growing issue is that too much functionality is in GitHub and not in Git itself. So while you can move or mirror your repository very easily, moving your issue tracker or pending pull requests is a lot harder and comes with huge loss of information (e.g. there is no way to contact the submitter of a bug report, as all you get is a GitHub username, not email and GitHub doesn’t even offer PMs).
That said, I’d happily ditch GitHub for anything more distributed, e.g. hosting Git repositories on IPFS, integration with git-bug, etc. You can mostly DIY that today, but a hoster that provides some free storage would be very much welcome to help with availability.
Another more basic thing I am missing today is a redirect service for repository names , having https://github.com/User/Project.git spread all over the build files makes it hard to move hosters or provide backup repositories. GNU Guix has mirror:// to solve that, but that’s about the only place I can think of with mirroring build in.
It’s a host for code repos. I would “switch” from GitHub if the repos I need to interact with were hosted somewhere else.
How do y’all use GitHub? Is everyone running their own open source project? None of my personal projects have ever been open source before. Very few of them were even useful for anyone but myself
I’ve been a developer for 20 years, I’ve never felt dependent on public code repos for my own career before, and I would be uncomfortable if it happened. No employer has even asked for my public GitHub profile or to see my commit activity. Not even when the company hosted their code on GitHub
Is everyone running their own open source project?
Essentially, I suppose. I put most of my personal projects on GitHub because a) I believe in the open-source philosophy generally and b) sometimes they are helpful to others! For example, because I put SmilApple on GitHub, someone was able to adapt it to make this. And besides, it’s a great way to distribute programs that you want other people to use, like my current project Chokistream, or when I made a fan-translation of a game. None of these are “serious” projects like a new framework or something, and all of them have very limited audiences, but if I’m coding them, I might as well publish them where someone else might be able to benefit from them. I also don’t feel like they’re important for my career, but they’re important for their own sake and I would care if I lost them.
Very few of them were even useful for anyone but myself
Most developers learn and grow by doing - which means learning by making mistakes, googling their error messages, and looking at examples of other people doing what they’re trying to do - which is why you should always open source your code unless there’s a specific reason not to. If you’ve ever made something that works, then your cube would be useful.
I’ve never felt dependent on public code repos for my own career before,
I hope you don’t actually believe this. The entire Internet, and computing itself, is built on the foundation of open source. This is like saying “why do I gotta pay taxes” when you and everyone you’ve never met has relied on roads etc. And that’s just the basic example - the real importance of, say, public education, is that, while you personally may not have used it, many many many other people have - and their education has pushed the quality of your collegues higher - which pushes you to be better, either as competition or cooperation. This is the actually accurate meaning of “the rising tide raises all ships.”
Even if you’ve never used Linux, or any open source software at all, the rest of us have, and we’re pushing your job and your career to new heights.
I’ve never felt dependent on public code repos for my own career before,
I hope you don’t actually believe this.
I think you misunderstood me. We all use open source software or develop using open source libraries, and in the context of the question, I don’t care where they host their code, as long as I can find it. But that isn’t what I was talking about. I have never felt like my career depended on me publicly hosting my own code. I have found jobs and connected with people through other means, and they haven’t even asked to see my github profile in any interviews I’ve been in.
which is why you should always open source your code unless there’s a specific reason not to. If you’ve ever made something that works, then your cube would be useful.
Sure, I have a Python script running on a Raspberry Pi controlling my garage door opener. You want it, I’ll show it to you. I believe in open source software, but I’m not going out of my way to publicly host (and document, yuck!) every little thing I’ve made for myself, especially when they have often been tailor made for my home environment, or hacked together in 15 minutes and riddled with secrets.
But my main reason is simply privacy. I don’t want to broadcast to the Internet what project I am working on right now, or reveal the architecture of my home network or smart home setup. There’s a lot you reveal about yourself when you show the world what you are doing, and I would prefer not to do that.
Nothing too dramatic yet, but a lot of features GitHub provides are GitHub specific, not Git, which creates a lock-in and dependency that will cause problems sooner or later and make moving difficult.
pull request model? Every one of the competing services
CI/CD system based on YAML definitions? Most every competitor.
static site hosting? Most competitors
protected branches? Most competitors
I’m not saying there isn’t vendor lock-in, but I am saying it likely isn’t the features of GitHub that are limiting that. Third party integrations will follow wherever the foot traffic goes.
The issue isn’t that the competition doesn’t offer similar functionality, but that there is no way to move your data to another hoster. If you move CI, you have to rewrite it as everybody uses a different language. If you move pull requests, you lose contact with all the users that made those pull requests, as Github doesn’t allow PMs and doesn’t publish emails by default.
I can move a Git repository in a single line, I can even mirror it to multiple hosts at the same time with ease. With all the surrounding aspects of a project that isn’t possible.
Though worth pointing out that this isn’t a GitHub specific problem, all software hosting suffers from this. Moving data between different Open Source bug tracker ain’t exactly easy either. There aren’t very many tools that are properly distributed in the way Git is and the few that there are, don’t seem to have very wide adoption (e.g. git-bug).
Don’t know if anyone remembers but private repo’s used to be restricted on GitHub, so I actually use BitBucket for most of my private stuff.
Feels like it wouldn’t take much change for me to leave with my own stuff although some presence would always be necessary due to contributions. I don’t use any of the “features” of GH though, except for pages and that’s for work.
The problem is that you lose out on dev attention when moving away from github.
I moved my projects into github when placeholder projects literally containing a README with a link to the real repo only got way more interaction on github than in the real repository: More stars, more views, more issue reports and even more PRs (where the devs have obviously Cloned the repo from the actual repository but could not be arsed to push there as well).
If you want your project to be visible, it needs to be on github at this point in time:-(
I host my projects mostly on Codeberg but still keep a Github account because of the multitude of useful projects that are unfortunately hosted on GitHub. I wouldn’t waste a second to delete my GH account if those projects migrated to Codeberg or any other Libre alternatives.
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