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…
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.
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)
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.
Btw, there are some CI runners on Codeberg, but they’re not well advertised, and not as feature-rich
Also, what if MS or the government starts getting hostile and taking down Linux and other FOSS repos they don’t like?
Then projects move their repos somewhere else which is pretty easy with git.
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.
Atom is back to life, kinda, there’s a fork of it called Pulsar that’s actually really pretty good
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’ve known people IRL who talk about the GPL like it’s a virus infecting your code
Respectfully disagree. I can only speculate why other developers choose MIT. But for small and medium-sized projects, a more restrictive license is unlikely to protect them from this scenario anyway. And if that’s true, one could argue it’s better to go down a road where corporate sponsorships are potentially more likely.
Personally, I often choose MIT because I don’t care who uses my code and for what, and I’d prefer that it be easy to borrow from. I used to be concerned about how my code was used, but over the years I’ve developed a strong dislike for copyright as a concept in general so I fight it how I can. Some of my projects are so simple that even MIT seems like overkill. In those cases I use the Unlicense.
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.
Serious answer: technical inertia and legacy reasons and most people don’t want to bother migrating established projects.
Open Source projects get lots of free features for being on GitHub. Nobody else is beating that offering at current.
What are those free features? Why doesn’t Codeberg have it?
- 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.
- Better issue tracking - FJ’s issue tracking is pretty good, and perfetcly fine for small projects, but GH’s is better.
- Better CLI -
fjis decent and improving, butghis better - Better project pages - Codeberg Pages is decent and improving, but GH Pages are better.
- 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.
Because running servers costs money. The project I work on gets donations towards it’s CI costs and it’s not insignificant.
Free github actions
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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
Why wait until it gets that bad versus at least duplicating elsewhere now?
so why aren’t you volunteering your time and effort to help at least one project migrate, instead of just complaining they haven’t?
Inertia. And GitHub was actually good, despite MS ownership. Until recently.
It really is quite amazing how fast its gone completely to shit. The site is so fucking slow so much of the time. I’ve started moving my projects one-by-one to a Forgejo instance I control, the main hurdle is just updating actions workflows to work there.
In hindsight the period 2015-2022 was a kind of a golden age for Microsoft.
They actually made (well, acquired) some good software, and even not-so-good stuff like Azure had a point of existing.Of course it all went downhill very quickly.
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!
Why do you make the argument that Red Hat is the biggest contributor?
Searching Linux contributor breakdown by organization puts them tied for 3rd at ~7%.
https://commandlinux.com/statistics/linux-kernel-contributors-lines-of-code-statistics/
Don’t get me wrong. Intel leading the corporate contributions is worse. lol
Pardon, I remembered it so from a graph I saw a few months ago. Perhaps I misremembered, or perhaps things changed since then
In the first link, look at the parameters in the link. It is for last 365 days. If you take all time, it is Red Hat.
To be explicit: I don’t like Red Hat.
Wow I went to fact check that claim and it’s actually no exaggeration. Here is the AP article.
Google and Amazon provide cloud computing and AI services to the Israeli military under “Project Nimbus,” a $1.2 billion contract signed in 2021, when Israel first tested out its in-house AI-powered targeting systems. The IDF has used Cisco and Dell server farms or data centers. Red Hat, an independent IBM subsidiary, also has provided cloud computing technologies to the Israeli military, while Palantir Technologies, a Microsoft partner in U.S. defense contracts, has a “strategic partnership” providing AI systems to help Israel’s war efforts.
Crazy to see Palantir, Google, Microsoft mentioned alongside …Red Hat.
It’s red from all the blood? well, fuck
If it helps to explain it, Red Hat is owned by IBM.
No love lost for IBM but I still wouldn’t expect to see casually mentioned alongside Palantir.
Oh… shoot… TIL, thanks!
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.
Github was around for a long time before MS bought it.
It’s really for the copilot integration. ,/s
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.
