Since the acquisition of GitHub by Microsoft in 2018, I’ve looked at the service a bit askance. But even though I’m quasi against it, GitHub’s ethics have never really affected me or forced me to reckon with them since I’m not particularly active in any open source projects and nobody cares about mine. Recently, though, I’ve resolved to live my values a bit better and am now working on ditching GitHub.
I don’t pay GitHub. Back in the day, they stopped offering free private repositories and it was at that point that I started using GitLab for private projects that I just don’t feel comfortable letting the world see. I know nobody cares about my stuff, but I’d still feel self-conscious about it. Especially since it’s up somewhere that potential employers might see it.
Since I don’t pay GitHub, and don’t really use any of the collaboration features myself (either as a contributor or maintainer), the whole thing just provides a convenient, cloneable backup for code I don’t mind being public.
But still, I don’t like where they’re going.
Even GitLab, where my private stuff is currently, they’ve embraced this “open core” model that I’m not really a fan of. But, similar to my relationship with GitHub, GitLab serves mostly as a backup for my private code. So I sort of begrudgingly use GitLab and GitHub out of convenience: If there’s something better, I don’t mind paying a few bucks a month to support it.
Side Note:
I don't begrudge companies making money off of closed-source or proprietary software. I think they often are misguided as to whether there's actually a need for their software to be closed/proprietary, but nonetheless, I would consider myself as a (very passive) Free Software advocate, not a zealot. The existence of proprietary software doesn't bother me, I just wish more software was Free.
My objection with the GitLab model is just that it started as something completely open source and has been wrapped up into something that's not. The way they manage the open-source vs proprietary editions is pretty transparent and people seem to be mostly okay with how they've managed it thus far, but at any point they could turn bad. Plus, now that they're a public company, they're beholden to their shareholders over their customers, users, and contributors.
So at some point after the GitHub acquisition, I started casually looking into good alternatives (both for GitHub and GitLab). I didn’t really find anything I wanted to commit to and the whole thing sort of slipped my mind as I became busy with other things. Then at some point I stumbled onto sourcehut. It looked promising. In December of 2020 I claimed sr.ht/~jos, and decided that I wanted to support the project. I subscribed for their $50/year tier and… promptly did nothing with it. And I mean that literally. It wasn’t until almost a year and a half later, just this past May of 2022, that I uploaded an ssh key, set up 2FA, and resolved to start using it.
The recent controversy in some circles around GitHub’s co-pilot spurred me to finally get serious about migrating. In addition to sourcehut, I’ve also claimed codeberg.org/josaphat since they’re quite similar to GitHub. I don’t think I’d recommend sourcehut to any friends or colleagues who aren’t well-versed with git; I’d refer them to codeberg instead.
I’ve almost got myself migrated off of GitHub. For now, I plan on leaving my repositories on there and just referring people to either sourcehut or codeberg, depending on the project.
The last thing on my todo list is to stop using GitHub Pages. This site is currently hosted on GitHub Pages, as is howoldis.space. I thought about setting something up with a cloud service provider, but since Codeberg has Codeberg Pages, I’ll just migrate to that.
At that point I’ll be off of GitHub.