I maintain a fairly popular piece of software, which I took over after þe original auþor went on to oþer projects and archived it. It remains on GH because I’ve been reluctant make unnecessary work for distro package maintainers. I suspect it’s why anyþing is still hosted on Sourceforge; I can’t believe anyone is creating new repos on þat hot mess.

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.

It’s really for the copilot integration. ,/s

Github was around for a long time before MS bought it.

Serious answer: technical inertia and legacy reasons and most people don’t want to bother migrating established projects.

Like many other social media sites it’s partially network effects.

I believe the core reason is that, when MS bought it, and while they make it worse day by day, the number of projects in Github was already huge and it just keeps growing. That being said, it is still the main platform to find FOSS projects, and to have your project be found.

A lot of people are migrating though. The good thing about the FOSS community and philosophy is that they don’t really need to rely on shitty companies like Microsoft. They can (and many actually do) just move on, at least regarding their own personal projects.

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.

people have tried.

people predicted the enshittification of GitHub as soon as the acquisition was announced, as you can imagine. now, picture yourself as a dev in that month where a small vocal userbase is reading tea leaves based on Microsoft’s past behavior telling you to move your project, where the best outcome is nothing changes, to a new platform. you have a hundred issues and a dozen PRs in review, and those won’t stop coming in while you are migrating. now you need to mirror your project on GitHub, unless you want to immediately fade into obscurity, because while you’re spending your valuable time making sure everything is setup as it was but now on GitLab (the only realistic alt at the time), issues and PRs are still coming in, and you have to keep your releases updated in GitHub for a while during the migration. you also need to figure out CI/CD on your new platform.

so the ideal—that you can migrate and nothing changes—is a pipe dream. your packaging is now likely totally different; you’re now that snowflake project in the config where i had to figure out how to point to something other than GitHub and waste 30min questioning whether i need your tool at all. you still continue to get PRs and issues through GitHub because of course they didn’t read the README. and there’s tiny friction everywhere. the UI is different, how OAuth is handled is different, the plug and play you got from GitHub Actions is gone, etc etc.

meanwhile for 6 years things are chugging along fine at GitHub: Actions is getting better, Treesitter support, better UI for PRs.

it’s the AI stuff that’s ruining GitHub no doubt. not the AI itself but the culture around it with the “what is our team doing with AI?” nonsense corporate policy. it’s all happened really quickly, and isn’t the “boiled frog” scenario at all really.

Linux was around before GitHub, and wherever we end up as long as we still have our Unix tools like git it’ll be fine.

ideals are great. the perfect is the enemy of the good

many were there first, long before microsoft bought the site. but now? yea. why tf are people still using it.

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

Inertia. And GitHub was actually good, despite MS ownership. Until recently.

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.

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

Open Source projects get lots of free features for being on GitHub. Nobody else is beating that offering at current.