The fact is, lots of people are very happy using AI tools, and most of those hook straight into GitHub. If AI is driving all this new code, it's only going to make moving away from GitHub more painful.
Businesses I've spoken to hate the idea of moving their code forge. Migrations like that suck and they're expensive. There isn't a meaningful differentiator between the other managed options, so the goal would just be to stand still. Unless GitHub's stability spirals fast I don't see a big wave of businesses leaving.
I say all this as someone who's been moving their code over to their own Forgejo instance. I'm all for more competition and fragmentation in this area, I just don't think it's happening soon.
Yep, been through a somewhat pointless GitHub to GitLab migration because, at the time, GitLab was cheaper. Now GitHub is cheaper again and the migration was a big annoying and expensive project.
I am concerned that it will be much more difficult to discover FOSS projects with whatever the new regimes are, similar to how Discord has walled off a great deal of the discussion forums and collaborative groups.
Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly.
Anecdotal, but we've had success with gitea and having agents use "tea" (gh cli alternative) as a skill. If the cli tool you're asking it to use is similar enough it will use it instead of gh without any (major) issues.
- Code repository
- Project wiki
- Project roadmap/planning
- Static site hosting
- Issue tracking
- Internal and external contributions (PRs)
- Code review
- Cross platform CI pipelines/runners
- Release hosting
Of these key things, what is Github good at and how much can you improve by providing an alternative that's faster/cheaper/more robust?
Of these I think the only thing Github stays competitive at is "code repository." Everything else kinda sucks and/or is expensive and flaky.
Just as an example, there's that hilarious "just give me an EXE" Reddit post from a few years back. It's fun to laugh it given the state/purpose of Github but you can also look at that as a lost market for Github. Why can't you provide a nice landing page with downloads/installers in a very clean landing page for your project on GitHub? It could even be a premium feature if it means paying for storage/bandwidth.
And don't get me started on actions. Absolute trash tier product that they should be ashamed at the state of.
One project we are contributingto the Fraunhofer team developing it has had an internal gitlab with CI/CD and mirrors at three different sites: gitlab.com, opencode.de and code.europa.eu . Now they are slowly trying to move to gitlab.com for the main repo as they cannot open their own repo enough for security/legal reasons. However, the CI/CD stuff still only runs on their gitlab.
Now we have our own gitlab instance we, were we are doing some small frontend work as part of a funded project on national level and have a mirror on GitHub for visibility reasons. Now we have another EU funded project that has its CI/CD on another gitlab instance at a partner. All come with their own onboarding and federated IDM quirks.
It is a total mess. While git is certainly distributed, the workflow is a mess. You end up cherrypicking CI/CD configs and divergent features all over the place.
I wonder: Is there a l'meta-forge' that just would handle rebasing?
I actually understand people using bare git workflow with mailing lists. However, even for me the learning curve and necessary attention span/social contracts is too much a challenge.
With the atproto approach you don't have to worry about reserving usernames specifically for one forge or another - usernames are atproto handles, your Bluesky handle, custom domain, etc.
I'm not sure if Tangled itself is the right incarnation of these ideas, but a protocol for PRs, issues, forks, and activity is the right direction for the industry.
I happen to make, I think, $5/month in donations (thank you). According to GitHub's numbers, they offer me about $25/month in the product everyone likes to hate: Actions.
I could certainly cut costs if I had to (half the cost, certainly not half the value, is mac runners), but my projects are definitely in a better shape for having this.
So: where do I get a better deal?
Also forge are already fragmented. I use OpenBSD and the software in ports comes from all over the web. You got the forges, web links,… As far as collaboration go, you can always send an email to the person. Up to them to accept it. If I care that much, I will publish a blog post or share it via the community’s channel.
Those articles look like linkedin-style post to work on your brand or for some internet points.
But why? Those are there to manufacture engagement on GitHub, it doesn't have any inherent value to track that.
> Get your username locked in NOW
Instead use the opportunity to move to your own domain.
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atproto apps also tend to separate the PDS form the app view, so you can easily use the same data with different front ends.
And, atproto's identity model is much better. Rather than being tied to a server like the data, it's DID-based and you can use it with multiple PDSes.
And that's just the Bluesky-like apps. Other non-microblog atproto apps use their own PDS, or store data on yours.
See, I only have one project where this actually matters (and help maintain another), but: I get to test on mac and Windows, both ARM and x64, for free.
Then, with a one line import, I can use Linux+QEMU to test a bunch of other architectures.
Adding a couple other deps, I can have VMs to test: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, illumos, Solaris… the list goes on.
And thanks to other providers I now also get RISC-V, IBM Z and Power runners for free.
So, yeah, for the other projects, I could have CI on a self-hosted Forgejo instance. I could also run tests on my dev machine before commiting and get 95% or the same benefit.
The value in CI is that it can run tests that are inconvenient to run locally.
The rest of us who started developing before GitHub, or been around communities that self-host their infrastructure, we're already used with everything being spread all over the place, this place accepts patches via email, this one wants a URL to a pastebin containing the patch, others use GitLab, some the public service, others self-hosted, and so on.
I don't think this sort of article is for us, but for the former mentioned usergroup.
I for one would never contribute to a project that requires one of the above. I know some will shoot back with "but Linux!", but that's the exception that proves the rule.
They’re not exactly begging for your contribution, are they? It’s very much voluntary. They’re just stating how to communicate with them.
Most of the reasons seem to boil down to "X bad", where X is some combination of Github, Microsoft, America, and AI