The question of using proprietary tools to build FOSS has always been one of the tension points in our community. One of the most prominent proprietary tools is github.com and the non-FOSS parts of gitlab.com (and a longer tail of other platforms).

A while ago I came across Give Up GitHub from the Software Freedom Conservancy which is on one side of this. My opinion remains nuanced and split. One I think few people would argue with is that there’s been enormous value provided to FOSS by the $0 github.com (and gitlab.com etc) services. Just the basic hosting of git infrastructure, issue tracking and other ancillary things (discussions, etc) but especially GitHub Actions.

There are a lot of critical projects out there getting by with the $0 “free/personal organization” infrastructure. It’s actually plenty for most projects (e.g. mature language libraries).

And while GitHub hasn’t been shy about pushing into the web interface things like Copilot (a proprietary agent framework) – in my opinion the platform still generally hasn’t been subject to platform decay . I mean, there’s no advertisements (which probably wouldn’t work because people would use custom interfaces talking to the API anyways).

This could of course change literally tomorrow; or next month, etc. But my gut says that at the current time Microsoft is OK funding github.com just to provide reliable infrastructure for their own teams, and those using it at large scale on premise probably provide enough income to offset the loss-leader economics for now.

I personally believe in (and argue for at my employer) avoiding a truly deep dependency on any one (proprietary) service (which includes github.com). In particular, I think Forgejo is a nice bit of software; it’s easy to run on premise for homelabs etc. The decision to run the Fedora Forge was not an easy one – there’s real ecosystem splitting effects, but I think we’ll be OK.

The thing is though, running a $0, publicly reachable internet service where people can just store/write things is genuinely hard (and especially when paired with a service to execute arbitrary code like Github Actions). It’s under constant attack from spam, scraping, bitcoin mining and abuse in a way that probably few people outside of the administrators truly appreciate.

I have a lot of respect for people and projects choosing to self-host or use smaller-scale hosts like Codeberg , but there’s real tradeoffs there around sustainability and availability.

I don’t expect this status quo to change much in the near future. In the next post, I’ll talk about how this relates to agentic AI.