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Comment by johnisgood

6 hours ago

Apparently they have issues with self-hosting and basic git usage so I am not surprised, but yes, so many open source advocates, yet they literally depend on Microsoft, a bit too much.

> but yes, so many open source advocates, yet they literally depend on Microsoft, a bit too much.

I have abandoned github and even gitlab for all intents and purposes. But there's another side to consider in this.

It's always risky for the FOSS community to depend on a service that doesn't offer interoperability and freedom of migration. Ironically, Github is such a service built on a tool (git) that's built for maximum interop and migration. But the popularity of Github among the developer community isn't an accident. They worked really hard during their early stages as a startup, to gain the trust of community. Nobody foresaw Microsoft buying them at that stage (though you should really just assume that it would happen eventually).

The reluctance of a lot of them to abandon the platform can be attributed to lack of principles - IF it was an isolated incident. But we see the same story repeating with several development platforms. NPM is an example. PyPI and crates.io are still independent, as far as I know. But they aren't free of corporate influences either. No matter how much we try to avoid them, the companies just buy their way into these platforms when they become popular enough. I'm not happy with this. But I don't know a solution either.