How and Why to Ditch GitHub
It's just possible that you, a sentient being with active sensory input, have cause for concern about the security of data hosted both in the United States and by Microsoft. GitHub has been ubiquitous and indispensable for technologists. But maybe it's time to reconsider that status.
Look, I really like using GitHub. If you're a developer, or someone who interacts with a lot of open source projects, GitHub has been The Place To Be™ for years now. It's even an assumed component of a resume for many jobs in tech. I personally have hundreds of starred repositories on my GitHub account, and my projects have benefited from its ubiquity and ease of use.
GitHub is not the only Git hosting service in town. In fact, there are a bunch of other towns, and GitHub's neighborhood is getting shady as hell. Between Microsoft's seeming inability to keep nation state actors out of its business, the US government's questionable choices around cybersecurity, and GitHub's use of everyone's code to train its language models, I felt it was time to seek greener pastures for my code.
You ever have something that you know in your bones is the right thing to do, but it seems unreasonably onerous? Moving off GitHub has felt that way for me for quite some time. While you can't always choose an ethical option in a culture of consumption, this one felt important enough to try. My technical efforts contributing to a technology I vehemently oppose did not sit well with me.
