I think I've done most of the necessary preparation now in readiness for getting out of Github. I had been claiming that I was going to do that for the last three years and its recent purchase by Microsoft provided me with a slam-dunkin reason to finally do it. I've slated closure of my account for 11th of June 2018, added as a TODO item in org-agenda. That will give enough time for any Freedombone systems out there to automatically update the repos to the new location.

It has been fun being on Github. I stayed there because it mostly seemed to not be evil, despite being another proprietary silo. People sometimes had a dig at me for the hypocrisy of promoting self-hosting while having the repos in a silo, and they were entirely justified in doing so. The main advantage of Github was just visibility and searchability. Apart from that other systems such as Gogs, Gitea and Gitlab have very similar features. It's the same kind of reason why video creators post to YouTube rather than just their own sites. You can self-host videos, but who is going to discover them? Similar applies with software projects.

Like many folks from the FOSS side of the world I could rant at length about Microsoft. In recent years during the post-Ballmer era they say they've become a lot more friendly towards open source. They fund the Linux Foundation and some of their software is released under copyleft licenses. But not much of it is. Their desktop and server/cloud operating systems, and their office productivity software remains, as far as I know, closed source. They also still extort people using software patents. This indicates to me that Microsoft's new found love of FOSS is just superficial and that fundamentally their interests or corporate ethos have not changed. Having some FOSSy things enables them to recruit bright young engineers and makes for some nice sounding publicity material at conferences. They will no doubt claim that buying Github proves - via putting their cash where their mouth is - that they are an honest player on the FOSS scene. But a couple of years down the line I expect that Github, if it still exists at all, will be pushing ads, might have some login which requires being on a Microsoft platform and will be very specific to Windows, Microsoft APIs and Visual Studio. Anything else which can't be locked in will be sidelined and then dropped like a coyote over a cliff edge.

But in a way Microsoft has done me a favor. In buying Github it made a decision which was a fuzzy trade-off of social and technical factors into a clear line in the sand and a question of which side you're on. Their acquisition will cause some amount of dissruption to FOSS development, and I'm sure they must have been aware of that as a desired outcome when they made the deal. Lots of installed things point to Github repos and if there are enough projects leaving Github then those things will start breaking.

So what's the way forward? We have quite good replacements for Github, but they lack the community element. Perhaps the fediverse protocols can help here, adding a single sign-on and a federated way of publishing changes and discussing features and bugs. Another possibility would be to create a software directory on a distributed hash table. I think the developer community has the capability and now the motivation to begin tackling these problems. Producing another giant silo like Github isn't the answer.