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…

EDIT: All right, all right, I’ve gotten schooled. Thank you, O wise ones; I didn’t realize how much Microsoft literally depends on Linux, among other things. I will proceed to shut up.

  • 9point6@lemmy.world
    84·
    5 months ago

    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.

  • BartyDeCanter@piefed.socialEnglish
    59·
    5 months ago

    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.

    • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
      10·
      5 months ago

      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.

      • They embraced! :D
      • They extended! :D
      • . . .aw, shit. :/

      I’ve only a basic understanding of using Git myself, but I think I’m gonna learn it with a self-hosted Forgejo for my Godot projects too.

      Then for the parts that don’t have feature parity, I won’t know what I’m missing, and I have no need for “iNdUsTrY sTaNdArD LeAdiNg oPtiMiZeD sYnErGyStiC wOrKfLoWs” or whatever hahaha.

      It does definitely present a conundrum if you want people to see your open source software though. Damn network effect. =\

      • BartyDeCanter@piefed.socialEnglish
        9·
        5 months ago

        The number one thing to remember about git is that you don’t need a full hosting service around it for basic functionality. If it’s just you, a single local repo will probably serve you just fine, maybe use a bare repo on your main machine or a Pi-level device if you like as a remote/backup. Just git init or git init --bare and you’re good to go. GitHub, Codeberg, Forgejo, and all the others exist to serve multi-contributor and/or public project-level needs.

        The number two thing to remember is that it is based around graph theory.

        • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
          2·
          5 months ago

          That’s some really helpful advice, thank you! 😃 I actually didn’t know you could just make any local folder a repo like that.

          Would a Forgejo instance still be helpful if I wanted to have “one point of truth” between multiple machines even if I’m the only dev? I already use Syncthing, but for some reason I feel like there’d be a lot of sync conflicts and stuff.

          The other main reason for wanting to learn Git, of course, is because it’s otherwise more difficult to try out changes to scripts and experiment, without finding yourself lost in the weeds and forgetting what worked last.

          My current “version control” is “copy the entire project folder before you do anything major.” 😂

          • BartyDeCanter@piefed.socialEnglish
            2·
            5 months ago

            If you just want one point of truth, the minimal version is to create a bare repo somewhere that you have ssh access to or your local machine. Then you can clone/pull/push from it.

            A bare repo is a special kind of repo meant for exactly this, but can be a bit confusing at first. A normal repo contains all of your current working files and a special .git directory that holds all the files/blobs/history that git needs to work. A bare repo is just the .git as a top directory with bare=true in its config. So you can use it as a remote, but it never has a working set. They are usually named something like my_repo.git.

            Edit:

            Here’s a basic example for setting it all up in a fully local way:

            mkdir ~/bares  
git init --bare ~/bares/my_repo.git  
mkdir ~/code  
git clone ~/bares/my_repo.git ~/code/my_repo

            And then you have remotes as your main source of truth in ~/bares and your working copies in ~/code. If you want to access from another machine that has ssh access to the first, you can do:

            mkdir ~/code  
git clone user@host:~/bares/my_repo.git ~/code/my_repo

            And then use git pull/push to keep it all in sync. Don’t use Syncthing on a git repo, it eventually goes badly.

            • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
              2·
              5 months ago

              This was really informative, thank you so much for taking the time! Definitely bookmarking this. :)

              I was looking up further why you’d use a bare repo over a standard one. Somebody said for just sharing a repo between users, “snapshots just take up unnecessary space.”

              …But would that mean you can’t roll back history? Maybe I’m ignorant on the term snapshot in Git context lol.

              But yeah, I really appreciate the post and I think that’ll get me on the right foot, to actually developing games instead of setting up yet another tool and procrastinating what I want to actually be doing anyway. 😂

              Glad my instinct was correct about not using Syncthing for this purpose. XD

              • BartyDeCanter@piefed.socialEnglish
                2·
                5 months ago

                Happy to help! And yes, I have no idea what they’re talking about. If you don’t have snapshots (commits) you don’t have version control.

                Let me know when you get your game going, I’d love to check it out. I’m working on a few myself.

    • Bogus007@lemmy.zip
      2·
      5 months ago

      Just to give some relevant information: Git, the major program behind GitHub, has been developed by Linus Torvals. The license allowed the free use of git until today. Some people took git and built a web application around - GitHub was born. Sure they added some features, but the engine was git! In 2018 these “creators” of GitHub sold their product to Microsoft. They gave a s**t on the community and what may happen afterwards.

  • Xanthrax@lemmy.world
    41·
    5 months ago

    Why aren’t all the reddit users over here yet? Consolidation and ease of use. Big number make brain happy.

    • trilobite@lemmy.ml
      15·
      5 months ago

      Lazyness? Its why Amazon is such a success. Too difficult to do online search. Amazon is convinient.

        • utopiah@lemmy.ml
          4·
          5 months ago

          Doubt it, most other online stores with the same coverage do offer similar conditions.

          • sonstwas@sh.itjust.works
            3·
            5 months ago

            The difference is the wide range of products available on Amazon. I can buy 5 products from widely different areas and only pay shipping once (or maybe twice depending on availability).

            If I were to order these 5 products on 5 different stores I’d pay 5 times shipping.

        • Bogus007@lemmy.zip
          2·
          5 months ago

          Your local or regional provider can and will send you books in the same time - perhaps not in 24h, but this may be rarely the case that somebody is in a such dearly need of a book.

          I am buying books from my local provider, though more expensive, but I want people to have jobs - considering how many bookstores closed due to Amazon - and the possibility to go there, have a book in my hand and read it a bit.

        • Dymonika@lemmy.mlOP
          2·
          5 months ago

          It’s not the shipping; it’s the return policy. Amazon’s is almost impossible to beat apart from certain in-person stores like Costco or perhaps ALDI.

          • Matty Roses@lemmy.today
            1·
            5 months ago

            Yeah - now, the downsides of this are well covered, especially by Corey Doctrow, in that once the users are locked into the platform, Amazon decreases the actual benefits - and then starts chisling the sellers as well.

            But to fix that, you do need to do something besides just scold the customers.

      • Dymonika@lemmy.mlOP
        1·
        5 months ago

        Ha, if only that were the truth. I keep preaching over there and telling people to check out /r/RedditAlternatives, at least, so I like to think that I’ve moved at least one person over, which makes it all worthwhile.

    • Loren@beehaw.orgEnglish
      10·
      5 months ago

      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.

      • flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz
        9·
        5 months ago

        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.

        • Loren@beehaw.orgEnglish
          2·
          5 months ago

          There was a brief time there where I thought even Xbox was doing pretty good shit. Backwards compatibility and the Xbox Adaptive Controller come to mind. With the latter especially, I feel like that was a lot of R&D for a relatively niche product. Nowadays, idk wtf they’re doing over there besides constantly fucking up.

  • jollyrogue@lemmy.ml
    26·
    5 months ago

    For some people, they don’t actually care about the politics of FOSS; they want a portfolio for employers.

    • MangoCats@feddit.itEnglish
      3·
      5 months ago

      I use both (why not?, they’re both free and it’s trivial to add a remote) - I find github is a little quicker to respond, a little easier to work with, and much more well known when you ask someone to go there they’re not queasy about what they might be connecting to…

  • stratself@lemdro.idEnglish
    26·
    5 months ago

    The case of free CI/CD, visibility, and network effects are already said. So I wanna offer an anectode: someone I know is a graphic designer, who maintains a project that curate icons. Moving to Codeberg means he has to interact with PRs using the CLI, which he really does not have familiarity with. GitHub OTOH has a simple desktop client that allows natively switching across PRs, approving then in the UI, etc. It’s really, really convenient for someone who’s not a developer.

    I think Forgejo-based platforms will need to work on a very good GUI client, in order to attract less technical contributors.

      • stratself@lemdro.idEnglish
        6·
        5 months ago

        The idea is to download the “project” down to a local machine, switch to the contributors’ PRs, and have those new files natively show up in their directories. Then they can use local software i.e. Inkscape/Illustrator/etc to edit those SVGs and commit the appropriate changes. This is really not feasible with a forge’s web UI.

  • Eggymatrix@sh.itjust.works
    25·
    5 months ago

    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

    • Dymonika@lemmy.mlOP
      7·
      5 months ago

      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?

      • festus@lemmy.caEnglish
        13·
        5 months ago

        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.

      • Eggymatrix@sh.itjust.works
        1·
        5 months ago

        All these projects for sure are cloned on multiple backups, if something happens and github is no longer viable it is a minimal effort to clone the source code and bug tracking and move it somewhere else. Serious projects will have contingenties in place for this, lesser projects will do what the big guys do

  • plutopos@lemmy.zip
    23·
    5 months ago

    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 Hat, while the second biggest is Meta. The Linux ecosystem is not inherently nonprofit!

  • gwl [he/him]@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    20·
    5 months ago

    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)

  • utopiah@lemmy.ml
    20·
    5 months ago

    It’s disappointing yet unsurprising to read the recurring answers, namely :

    • cost
    • incumbency

    precisely because it’s absolutely avoidable and a well known strategy. It’s so well known that it’s precisely why Micro$lop bought Github in the first place. People are there and the free tiers is enough to get the long tail.

    Meanwhile since that strategy happened people who consider smart enough should know the genuine cost behind this : it’s a TRAP. Plain and simple, you get there and you get STUCK there.

    So… yes it takes some sweat and even some money to leave the trap … but if you care about freedom, as most free software or open-source developers might, then it’s aligned with your value.

      • алиса 🐗@lemmy.zip
        1·
        4 months ago

        no, thats just what a friend of mine said genuinely. unfortunately, gh (or rather it’s features) is necessary in some cases. such as free ci, bandwidth and storage.

  • thejml@sh.itjust.works
    17·
    5 months ago

    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.

    • gndagreborn@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      5 months ago

      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.

    • Dymonika@beehaw.org
      3·
      5 months ago

      Yeah, this is why I doubled this post on Reddit as well… though I keep encouraging people to check out Lemmy!