Not sure if I 100% see it happening “soon” but we are seeing a general shift in where repos are being created/maintained.
Most of the applications I use host their code on GitHub. I’m actively looking for replacements for as many of them as possible, because it’s just immoral to participate with Microsoft, IMO.
But that’s a poor article. A more accurate headline might be “Concerns about GitHub’s parent company, Microsoft”. But that wouldn’t generate the same attention.
Nice. Yeah I dont 100% agree with everything in the article, but the general gist is one I agree with. I see more open source devs starting to make the migration to other platforms.
I dont like having 90%ish of all git repos all in one handbasket. Even if MS was benevolent, its not good to have all things in one place. A bad actor could take down all of GH and we would be screwed.
Im seeing some people talk about codeberg. I personally have my online mirrors there. I also personally host my own forgejo with my new projects. Thats my stack at the moment.
GL with your search!
I dont like having 90%ish of all git repos all in one handbasket. Even if MS was benevolent, its not good to have all things in one place. A bad actor could take down all of GH and we would be screwed.
That is not how git works though. If github disappeared today it would be a lot of confusion, but the code exists everywhere it is checked out. The owner/maintainer (or anyone really) can just add a new remote and push it. If they use github specific features like issues, they would be lost though.
Its one of those statements that are a bit nuanced. What I should have said is because a lot of git repos exist there, many services just pull from the git repos. npm/yarn, some pip, lots of ruby gems, etc…etc… so the times GitHub DOES go down, it causes mass outages at work. CI jobs stop working, developer envs just stop when package managers cant pull. Heck some languages use git urls AS the package manager. For better or worse the modern software development cycle depends on somewhat reliable git sources. And a vast majority of those are on github.
Last time github failed for a couple of hours, we were in the middle of a deploy for around 600,000 people. That was a fun experience. Learned our lesson!
You are correct though, in theory its all git, so we could (and now have) set up mirrored git repos for all our dependencies and code. But we didnt cause we were lazy.
Having a single centralized source will always give those issues. It can go down either temporarily or permanently. It is all part of the conveniance/single-point-of-failure scale.
In the short run it going down will cause some issues, which can be mitigated by having local mirrors of critical repos. However, moving to another place should in theory be as easy as replacing github.com with gitlab, codeberg, your-local-git-server url, etc (and auth info of course)
Actually testing what will happen if github and/or other services are down and see how your product or build pipeline handles it, is a very good thing to do, but very rarely is it done. It can be easily accomplished by for example adding a drop rule in iptables. Testing for bad things never seems to happen though, and then when it really is a problem nothing works and everyone panics.
I hope that trend continues. Codeberg is my homepage for the time being. I’m finding substitutes there.
I’ll check out Forgejo too, thanks for the recommendation!
The CEO ‘leaving’ is a distraction from the real news
The CEO ‘leaving’ is a symptom from the real news
Yeah, it’s weird that folks view this as the turning point. It’s not like they had any real independence from Microsoft since they got bought.
I just pick AGPLv3 to maximize freedom and leverage. I’m more radical than Stallman in this area. Stallman believes in and relies on copyright. I don’t…My aversion to intellectual property is one of the reasons why.
I mean, the GPL fundamentally relies on copyright to function.
One of those headlines that’s wrong, but by being said loudly enough makes itself more certainly wrong, and I want it to be wrong.
Weird.
