While somewhat late to the party, I’ve also decided to divest from GitHub for my code-hosting needs. Much has been written about why one might not feel comfortable on GitHub these days, and there are many good reasons to not use the platform:
-
As many other companies embracing AI, Microsoft/GitHub are training their models based on code and other data that does not belong to them. For example, GitHub Copilot is trained exclusively on projects hosted on GitHub, and completely ignores copyleft licenses (see also GiveUpGithub).
-
Microsoft is in strategic partnerships with companies like Palantir and ICE, thus actively contributing to (AI-assisted) human-rights violations in the US and across the globe.
-
Microsoft is perhaps the most complicit tech company in Israel’s illegal apartheid regime and ongoing genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza.
-
More generally, it makes sense for open source development not to be entirely dependant on the benevolence of one of the biggest tech companies on the planet.
As a result, I will be deleting my data from GitHub. For practical reasons I will keep my GitHub account to be able to contribute to projects hosted there, but hope that will become unnecessary long-term. In the future I want to host my own public instance of Forgejo, but for the time being I will be using Codeberg, which seems to be a good alternative.
If you’re interested in some other takes on why it makes sense to move off of the platform, check out this and this post.