It’s disappointing yet unsurprising to read the recurring answers, namely :

• cost
• incumbency

precisely because it’s absolutely avoidable and a well known strategy. It’s so well known that it’s precisely why Micro$lop bought Github in the first place. People are there and the free tiers is enough to get the long tail.

Meanwhile since that strategy happened people who consider smart enough should know the genuine cost behind this : it’s a TRAP. Plain and simple, you get there and you get STUCK there.

So… yes it takes some sweat and even some money to leave the trap … but if you care about freedom, as most free software or open-source developers might, then it’s aligned with your value.

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.

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

For some people, they don’t actually care about the politics of FOSS; they want a portfolio for employers.

I don’t move mine because of the hard limits at 100 repos and 100 MB of private storage. I wouldn’t mind paying to have more, but that’s not an option.

edit: it seems one can request limit increases, but I have no idea what’s their approval criteria.

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

The case of free CI/CD, visibility, and network effects are already said. So I wanna offer an anectode: someone I know is a graphic designer, who maintains a project that curate icons. Moving to Codeberg means he has to interact with PRs using the CLI, which he really does not have familiarity with. GitHub OTOH has a simple desktop client that allows natively switching across PRs, approving then in the UI, etc. It’s really, really convenient for someone who’s not a developer.

I think Forgejo-based platforms will need to work on a very good GUI client, in order to attract less technical contributors.

Codeberg doesn’t offer CI runners* for macOS for free.

It’s important if you have cross platform apps

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.

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

If you think github is unstable you haven’t tried codeberg. It’s down multiple times every day.