GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation

General News
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Scary. Can this lead to a mass migration if GitHub gets exponentially worst after integrating fully with Microsoft?

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It’ll be really hard considering just how much infra relies on GitHub. GitHub owns NPM, the defacto JavaScript registry, and almost all open source packages for web development (and other types of development, probably) live on GitHub.

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If this pushes some devs to actually finish Forgejo’s federation features that would be great.

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Would be great, I just don’t know how many devs would actually… care I guess? The power of GitHub is multifaceted:

  1. Bots on GitHub for opening PRs, handling PRs and issues, automating tasks, etc. As far as I know, Forgejo, Gitea, and GitLab don’t have the same style of bot APIs. Maybe I haven’t kept up to date with Forgejo progress, but this would be KILLER for larger projects.
  2. Free runners. Any public project gets free GitHub Runners for Linux, macOS, and Windows, meaning if you have a project that needs to be built on native hardware and don’t have the resources to build it yourself, GitHub has you covered for free. You can access 3rd party runners on GitHub, and Forgejo, Gitea and GitLab have their own CI/CD systems as well, buts its all bring your own hardware for self hosting. A cheap, multi-OS solution is what would bring me to host all my projects on a self-hosted Forgejo, even if I have to bring it from a service I rent.
  3. Federation partially solves the project discovery and management issues. But GitHub really shines as a social platform for devs, with the logged in homepage shows you projects similar to ones you have interacted with in issues, PRs and stars. An algorithm could be put in place with federation to help you find projects in your network of connections, but at least on the more “traditional” social platforms there has been some pushback on systems like this.

I don’t think anyone on Staff of PG didn’t already understand this; its probably why the code for the site is hosted on GitHub currently. However, I don’t want anyone not in the dev space or only just starting to think projects can move over easily. These networks of programmers and projects that have invested infra time into GitHub’s APIs and solutions might not have a suitable alternative available yet, even if other code forge solutions could do most of the project management they need.

EDIT: found some sources for public instances. forgejo-contrib/delightful-forgejo: A curated list of delightful Forgejo-related projects and resources. - Codeberg.org Some have free CI/runners, but the lack of non-Unix runners still hurts. I also don’t think this can be easily fixed, but this helps a majority of devs using runners I think

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Might not be their original intention in this case, but Microsoft are famous for their “embrace, extend, and extinguish” phrase years ago Embrace, extend, and extinguish - Wikipedia

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I thought GitHub had already lost all independence when it was bought my Microsoft. In my view the assimilation of GitHub into Microsoft’s CoreAI team just makes Microsoft’s intentions to AI scrape source code crystal clear.

The amount of reliance on GitHub by FOSS projects is very disturbing. I hope projects that rely on GitHub will finally wake up and migrate.

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