Why aren’t people moving away from Github? There’s Codeberg, Gitlab, and radicle. What’s holding them back?
I hope this is a good question:
What happens in a couple years when all this code that’s been written by Copilot and the like, Microsoft then turns around and says, “OH YEAH, BTW THAT WAS GENERATED BY OUR AI SO NOW WE OWN YOUR APP!” Look, most social media ToS says anything uploaded to their sites is owned by them now, royalties-free.
Right now it’s no big deal to any AI company because more code means more training for the AI, but will we get to the point that they’re happy with code output enough and then turn around claiming they own those? Plus, any successful apps are then basically free/no cost contributed projects?
Bonus: Also, what happens when AI is trained on AI-written code that was initially wrong by AI? Is the system doomed to never really improve because of so many inaccuracies?
What happens in a couple years when all this code that’s been written by Copilot and the like, Microsoft then turns around and says, “OH YEAH, BTW THAT WAS GENERATED BY OUR AI SO NOW WE OWN YOUR APP!” Look, most social media ToS says anything uploaded to their sites is owned by them now, royalties-free.
courts have already ruled that AI can’t own copyright. if it’s not generated by humans, it doesn’t generate copyright.
How does that interplay with the whole “Corporations are people” and if the corporation owns the llm, it could theoretically claim ownership of what the llm generates? (To be clear I agree with the decision that ai shouldn’t get a copywrite and don’t think corporations are people but I am genuinely curious)
dunno. I’m not an IP lawyer. however i’ve read a few case summaries where they’ve tried to say putting inputs into an LLM gives copyright and the courts ruled it didn’t. if it doesn’t work for humans, it doesn’t work for corporations either.
granted, the area of law i work in, there’s lots of difference between legal outcomes if you’re merely set up as a partnership instead of a corporation so who knows.
LLMs have made it so that it takes longer to determine whether content is bad than it takes to make bad content. The solution SHOULD be to demand that people examine the content themselves and turn it into high-quality content, but that’s not going to happen so long as it is possible for anyone to submit pull requests. The only solution that will actually work is to restrict who is allowed to submit content to your projects.
So many things are ruined when friction is completely removed.
Meaningful friction my beloved
I knew physics class sucked… Always ignoring friction to do calculations…
hey i like spherical cows
Time to go back to email lists. Anyone can come along sure. But it’s only going to be the most determined.
AI agents can trivially send email. I don’t know what the solution is, other than to disallow submissions from people who already have a good reputation with the project. Even that’s not a good solution, because there really isn’t a way to get a reputation that is open to humans, but can’t be easily gamed by bots.
I wonder how many of these folks just don’t know about the alternatives. I’ve come across otherwise capable developers who think git and GitHub are the same thing. People come to software from all sorts of backgrounds so I can’t blame anyone for not knowing.
I also imagine that if people are aware, the activation energy of switching is too high. It’s more than just setting a new remote and pushing. You have to learn the new system, maybe migrate tickets, wrestle with CI, etc. For a hobby project it’s probably easier to shut it down and just go do something else. I also don’t blame them here. There’s more to life than open source, and its amazing people are able to contribute when they can.
My re-spec online classes started by installing VS Code and connecting it to user’s own GitHub repository that was then used to upload homework in Jupyter notebook format. It was pretty streamlined, that is good when you want to fast-forward into making students write their own first code lessons, leaving off technicalities, but there we didn’t heard a word about if any of these three choices are necessary to start coding. I only recently got interested enough to research other options, at the same time I left Windows as a default OS. I’m not sure any of my classmates would tho until something critical happens, and for many this pipeline is probably what they are still using by now.
Ok admission time. I have a project in GH that I could, for example, migrate to GitLab but I’m concerned it would break the pipeline or have a disastrous customer facing impact.
Edit: there are people (ahem) who might know code… but not everything re consequences of shifting a repo.
A lot of people study CS or programming because they have been told it would make them a lot of money. If you just want to make money and don’t care about anything else you’re always just going to put in the minimum effort required, so I’m not surprised people just can’t be bothered to switch.
I hate that. I’m the worst salesman ever, so I’m super bad at interviewing, but I’m a good programmer. Companies are very critical and wary though, because some people are very good salesmen but very bad programmers. I don’t blame them, but t’s a rough environment
Those people don’t run open source projects
Fair point, but OP didn’t specify open source projects, just why “people” don’t move away from GitHub.
oh you’re right
There’s also lots of people who become developers because they want to build the best software they can and don’t care to spend time thinking about whether one open source hosting platform is better for their code over another if they accomplish the same thing.
Your response is insanely narrow minded and judgemental, not everyone chooses to fight the same battles you do.
Nowhere in my comment did I imply what you are saying. Please don’t project your internet grievances onto me. The two are not mutually exclusive and I in no way implied that they were.
Fair that they’re not mutually exclusive, but you did imply that that’s why the majority don’t switch.
I refute that categorization actually, I never implied that it was most, only that some number of people do indeed fall into that category and I’ve seen it with my own eyes to be true.
Mostly my post intended to point out that not all devs give a single solitary fuck about FOSS and I would even go so far as to argue that yes, that probably constitutes a majority. Furthermore this attitude is likely a contributing factor (not the only factor by any means) towards the lack of excitement around switching over to open source version control web platforms.
If the developer truly believes in quality and fairness, then they will switch.
Are you a vegan?
Well I know for a fact your mom is a meat eater. And a chugger.
This problem has nothing to do with where you are hosting.
Yes, copilot streamlines things a bit. But the folk using claude et al just need a clone/fork of the repo.
Partially because URLs never die, and if you’ve got your project connected to a bunch of stuff it’s a huge pain to migrate.
I’ve got a ton of old open source projects and if people start bothering me over them I’ll just cancel contributions.
Also I don’t think Codeberg/forgejo runners are compatible with GH Actions, which is another barrier
How do you know those projects are shutting down and not moving?
I think the open source requirement is holding them back, people also want to start projects without immediately making them open source. Maybe they don’t know it yet.
These people, if they want to avoid github, will host their own private gitlab instance, or use just a local git repo, or another private repo, until they decide to make it public.
I think this makes a big contribution the disparity.
To add, I think it’s fine, as long as anyone can clone the github. It’s not like I have any solution to this.
There’s a lesson to be learned about making tools that need to be used with subtlety and making them more approachable than a fisher price hammer, and then getting shocked that people use them inappropriately.
I’m sure *this time* humanity will learn it’s lesson.
Literally computers
Literally everything! From nuclear energy to fire. The fiftieth time the caveman that invented fire used it, he said “eh, what’s the worst thing that could happen if I don’t do all the same stuff I did last time to keep me safe” and his whole fucking village burnt down.
Even projects on other repo systems have shut down. Too many AI submissions for them. LLMs are integrated so deeply into certain IDEs that some developers I’ve seen literally did not know they were using them (no, they couldn’t tell me why they thought writing a prompt in the IDE wasn’t hitting an LLM).
It’s a systemic issue that GitHub exacerbates but it’s by no means limited to it.
I can see people not realizing the LLM autocomplete was an LLM. But not the prompting.
And even then, that’s some fancy ass autocomplete if it’s not LLM powered…
I mean, using an LLM inherently asks you to not think and the kind of person to use them, intentionally or not, is obviously not the smartest cookie in the toolbox
Ironically, github is a bit better at detecting the slop (for now) since the default settings put claude et al as co-collaborators on commits or the project itself.
In a nutshell, the network effect. At an individual level, if someone wants to leave GitHub, they absolutely can. But unless they’re a repo owner or a BDFL, the project(s) they were working on would still be on GitHub. And that means they can’t access the GitHub PR process for development, or open tickets for new issues, or any other number of interactions, except for maybe pulling code from the repo.
On the flip side, at a project level, if the project owners agree that it’s time to leave GitHub, they absolutely can. And while they could convince the primary developers to also leave with them, the occasional contributors might still be left behind on GitHub. Moving away from GitHub could potentially cut the number of contributors down by a lot. And what’s guaranteed is that the project will have to retool for the new space they move to. And if it’s self-hosted, that’s even more work to do, all of which is kinda a distraction from whatever the project was meant to do.
The network effect is the result of the sum being more useful than its parts. When the telephone was invented, a single telephone on its own is entirely useless, because nobody else has one to use. But with ten telephone, one person has the potential to call any of 9 other people. With 10,000 telephones, that’s over 9000 people they could call, or those people calling them. At a million phones, the telephone is well entrenched into common usage. Even when more and more people despise making phone calls, the telephone is still around, having changed forms since the 1980s into the modern smartphone.
Why? Because networks are also stable: if a few thousand people give up their smartphones per year, the utility of the telephone is not substantially changed for the grand majority of telephone users. The threshold to break the network effect varies, but I hazard a guess that if 1/3 of telephone users gave up their numbers, then the telephone’s demise would be underway. Especially in the face of modern replacements.
I would regard GitHub as having a network effect, in the same way that Twitter should have collapsed but hasn’t. Too many local governments are invested into it as their sole social media presence, and in doing so, also force their citizens to also subscribe to Twitter. GitHub is not a monopoly in the sense that anti-trust laws would apply. But they are a monopoly in that they own the platform, and thus own the network.
But there’s an upside: communities of people are also networks. Depending on how cohesive the contributors to a particular GitHub repo are, enough people can make the move away and would sway the unwilling to also move with them. This is no different than convincing family members to move to Signal, for example. Yes, it’s hard. But communities look out for their common interests. And if AI slop is affecting a community, then even though they didn’t want to deal with it, they have to make a choice.
Be the community member you want to see. Advocate for change in your network of people, however big or small. Without critical mass, a community will only splinter when acting unilaterally.
Laziness.
momentum can be a pain in the buttocks. the time lost working on project, chasing mistakes that come with migrating tools, getting everyone across the globe on board.
must seem like k2 when you are hanging on janky anchors to begin with …
It’s not that I doubt you, but do you have some sort of source for this? I’m interested in the metrics.
They don’t provide specific numbers, but here’s GitHub themselves acknowledging it’s a big enough problem that they’re planning on implementing a feature they’ve ignored community requests about for like 10 years.
