this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
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Programming
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What did GitHub do?[serious]
They're just a monopoly and could easily pull a Unity, Twitter, Reddit, or whatever other big service exists.
It's the implication
Yep. I'm a very happy GitHub user, with my finger idling near the eject button since they're a prime candidate to pull a Unity.
Nothing too dramatic yet, but a lot of features GitHub provides are GitHub specific, not Git, which creates a lock-in and dependency that will cause problems sooner or later and make moving difficult.
Like what?
I'm not saying there isn't vendor lock-in, but I am saying it likely isn't the features of GitHub that are limiting that. Third party integrations will follow wherever the foot traffic goes.
The issue isn't that the competition doesn't offer similar functionality, but that there is no way to move your data to another hoster. If you move CI, you have to rewrite it as everybody uses a different language. If you move pull requests, you lose contact with all the users that made those pull requests, as Github doesn't allow PMs and doesn't publish emails by default.
I can move a Git repository in a single line, I can even mirror it to multiple hosts at the same time with ease. With all the surrounding aspects of a project that isn't possible.
Though worth pointing out that this isn't a GitHub specific problem, all software hosting suffers from this. Moving data between different Open Source bug tracker ain't exactly easy either. There aren't very many tools that are properly distributed in the way Git is and the few that there are, don't seem to have very wide adoption (e.g.
git-bug).