Why aren’t people moving away from Github? There’s Codeberg, Gitlab, and radicle. What’s holding them back?
I wonder how many of these folks just don’t know about the alternatives. I’ve come across otherwise capable developers who think git and GitHub are the same thing. People come to software from all sorts of backgrounds so I can’t blame anyone for not knowing.
I also imagine that if people are aware, the activation energy of switching is too high. It’s more than just setting a new remote and pushing. You have to learn the new system, maybe migrate tickets, wrestle with CI, etc. For a hobby project it’s probably easier to shut it down and just go do something else. I also don’t blame them here. There’s more to life than open source, and its amazing people are able to contribute when they can.
A lot of people study CS or programming because they have been told it would make them a lot of money. If you just want to make money and don’t care about anything else you’re always just going to put in the minimum effort required, so I’m not surprised people just can’t be bothered to switch.
Those people don’t run open source projects
Fair point, but OP didn’t specify open source projects, just why “people” don’t move away from GitHub.
oh you’re right
There’s also lots of people who become developers because they want to build the best software they can and don’t care to spend time thinking about whether one open source hosting platform is better for their code over another if they accomplish the same thing.
Your response is insanely narrow minded and judgemental, not everyone chooses to fight the same battles you do.
Nowhere in my comment did I imply what you are saying. Please don’t project your internet grievances onto me. The two are not mutually exclusive and I in no way implied that they were.
Fair that they’re not mutually exclusive, but you did imply that that’s why the majority don’t switch.
I refute that categorization actually, I never implied that it was most, only that some number of people do indeed fall into that category and I’ve seen it with my own eyes to be true.
Mostly my post intended to point out that not all devs give a single solitary fuck about FOSS and I would even go so far as to argue that yes, that probably constitutes a majority. Furthermore this attitude is likely a contributing factor (not the only factor by any means) towards the lack of excitement around switching over to open source version control web platforms.
If the developer truly believes in quality and fairness, then they will switch.
Are you a vegan?
Well I know for a fact your mom is a meat eater. And a chugger.
Edit: I see your point now. I knee jerked before thinking it through. I thought you was going for the weak maga style slander but I see you was in fact making a point
To your point. I was not a vegan but I was vegetarian for 6 years.
My apologies to you and your mother.
i wonder where they are getting that info from, im not in tech but i was visiting forums where cs has pretty low job prospects for a least a decade+ almost all the forums about cs, tech says that.
My re-spec online classes started by installing VS Code and connecting it to user’s own GitHub repository that was then used to upload homework in Jupyter notebook format. It was pretty streamlined, that is good when you want to fast-forward into making students write their own first code lessons, leaving off technicalities, but there we didn’t heard a word about if any of these three choices are necessary to start coding. I only recently got interested enough to research other options, at the same time I left Windows as a default OS. I’m not sure any of my classmates would tho until something critical happens, and for many this pipeline is probably what they are still using by now.
I get the impression this is common. It seems like education hasn’t caught up to the fact that a lot of people are wanting to learn software engineering, but they lack some fundamentals. There really should be an intro course going all the way from what is a file to maybe some basics about the ELF format? Sort of something that can lead into the OS course, but lay the foundation for just basic computer use. Let the nerds get their easy A, but give everyone else a better understanding and some fundamentals to build on.
Partially because URLs never die, and if you’ve got your project connected to a bunch of stuff it’s a huge pain to migrate.
I’ve got a ton of old open source projects and if people start bothering me over them I’ll just cancel contributions.
Also I don’t think Codeberg/forgejo runners are compatible with GH Actions, which is another barrier
This problem has nothing to do with where you are hosting.
Yes, copilot streamlines things a bit. But the folk using claude et al just need a clone/fork of the repo.
LLMs have made it so that it takes longer to determine whether content is bad than it takes to make bad content. The solution SHOULD be to demand that people examine the content themselves and turn it into high-quality content, but that’s not going to happen so long as it is possible for anyone to submit pull requests. The only solution that will actually work is to restrict who is allowed to submit content to your projects.
Time to go back to email lists. Anyone can come along sure. But it’s only going to be the most determined.
AI agents can trivially send email. I don’t know what the solution is, other than to disallow submissions from people who already have a good reputation with the project. Even that’s not a good solution, because there really isn’t a way to get a reputation that is open to humans, but can’t be easily gamed by bots.
I hope this is a good question:
What happens in a couple years when all this code that’s been written by Copilot and the like, Microsoft then turns around and says, “OH YEAH, BTW THAT WAS GENERATED BY OUR AI SO NOW WE OWN YOUR APP!” Look, most social media ToS says anything uploaded to their sites is owned by them now, royalties-free.
Right now it’s no big deal to any AI company because more code means more training for the AI, but will we get to the point that they’re happy with code output enough and then turn around claiming they own those? Plus, any successful apps are then basically free/no cost contributed projects?
Bonus: Also, what happens when AI is trained on AI-written code that was initially wrong by AI? Is the system doomed to never really improve because of so many inaccuracies?
Right now it’s no big deal to any AI company because more code means more training for the AI, but will we get to the point that they’re happy with code output enough and then turn around claiming they own those?
At least in the US:
The vast majority of commenters agreed that existing law is adequate in this area and that material generated wholly by AI is not copyrightable.
So it seems unlikely that they would be able to claim any ownership.
As for the rest of your comment (the parts around ownership): you always own the copyright for any copyrightable work you create, including code. When you post on a website, according to the ToS of that site, you’re licensing your comment/code/whatever to the website (you need to for them to be able to publish your work on their website).
Some (many, most depending on what you use) websites overlicense your work and use it for other purposes as well (like GitHub), but in the US the judges have basically ruled that AI companies can pirate whatever works they want without any attempt to license them and still be fine, so the “overlicense” bit is more of a formality at this point anyway.
That is an excellent question and I wouldn’t put it past them. Only time will tell.
They are already throwing a fit because Chinese companies are distilling their models, so them trying to copyright their copyright infringement machines is definitely plausible. And with a US system as it exists today, it might very well work. Hopefully the rest of the world will have told the US to fuck off by then…
Even projects on other repo systems have shut down. Too many AI submissions for them. LLMs are integrated so deeply into certain IDEs that some developers I’ve seen literally did not know they were using them (no, they couldn’t tell me why they thought writing a prompt in the IDE wasn’t hitting an LLM).
It’s a systemic issue that GitHub exacerbates but it’s by no means limited to it.
Microslop is one step ahead and has an online editor with Copilot integrated into it. That makes the chance of getting an LLM assisted or written PR even higher. Knowing Microslop, hey will go even further and have Copilot activated on all active repos, submitting PRs - and CoPilot will be opt-out
I wouldn’t put it past them.
Ironically, github is a bit better at detecting the slop (for now) since the default settings put claude et al as co-collaborators on commits or the project itself.
Only if they’re contributing through GitHub and not through local AI coding apps like Opencode or Claude CLI
Laziness.
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I think part of the problem is Microslop’s Github Copilot in the web, which makes it possible for non developers to quickly and easily create PRs without understanding a single thing about programming, let alone software development.
It wouldn’t surprise me of people genuinely think they are helping.
Why aren’t people moving away from Github?
I write open source software because it’s fun, and I publish on Github because it gives me a stronger professional profile.
So yeah for me it’s the potential difference between putting food on the table or not. Github stars suck for many reasons but they do help you stand out.
I recognise your name, but not sure from where… It for sure isn’t github BTW, because I don’t use it, but it does look familiar.
Anyway, if you happen to be known due to something you wrote, that’s great but would your popular project be used less if it weren’t on github, even as a mirror?
And do you believe having a public github profile when you started out (/ whatever project(s) you’re known for weren’t popular) made the difference in your hiring procedure? Did you ask?
momentum can be a pain in the buttocks. the time lost working on project, chasing mistakes that come with migrating tools, getting everyone across the globe on board.
must seem like k2 when you are hanging on janky anchors to begin with …
I still host a significant part of my code on GitHub, despite moderately hating Microslop, because:
- Their CI is mature and super fast. My gorgeous instance has selfhosted CI, but some actions only work on GitHub (release-plz has bugs for forgejo), and their CI servers are fast as fuck.
- Visibility. People look for code on GitHub. Maybe maybe maybe they look on code on Codeberg, but without a doubt, nobody looks for code on my selfhosted forgejo instance. I am looking forward to forgefed integration sonce over a year, but it’s not there yet.
Also, GitHub has become an identity provider for many services, such as crates.io to release rust crates (packages).
How do you know those projects are shutting down and not moving?
It’s not that I doubt you, but do you have some sort of source for this? I’m interested in the metrics.
They don’t provide specific numbers, but here’s GitHub themselves acknowledging it’s a big enough problem that they’re planning on implementing a feature they’ve ignored community requests about for like 10 years.
Thanks! That was just the kind of thing I was hoping for.
Abandon git, return to subversion.
I think the open source requirement is holding them back, people also want to start projects without immediately making them open source. Maybe they don’t know it yet.
These people, if they want to avoid github, will host their own private gitlab instance, or use just a local git repo, or another private repo, until they decide to make it public.
I think this makes a big contribution the disparity.
To add, I think it’s fine, as long as anyone can clone the github. It’s not like I have any solution to this.
