I’m fleeing to the mountains.
GitHub’s fate became sealed and its enshittification journey inevitable when it was swallowed by Microsoft back in 2018. Eight years later, and I’m out. That’s way too late and I apologize to myself. I have moved my public repositories of useless stuff to Codeberg .
Today GitHub is a data gold mine for Microsoft to train large language models on code, so that it can be converted into profit via future LLM service sales. The perfect intellectual honey pot, promising convenient git hosting and collaboration services with bells and whistles, but now in return for your original ideas and technical knowledge, in the form of software code. An immense amount of free open source code written by volunteers, often with passion and the desire to contribute something good and interesting to this world. Or just scratch a personal itch, that perhaps is also felt by others. Or share something to be proud of, something of high quality, something of critical importance to modern technical infrastructure, software building blocks that we cannot imagine our developer lives without, anything really. Then along comes big tech greed and shits all over the place, causing disruptions to society and free software ecosystems in the process.
I recommend you evacuate your own free software code away from GitHub, as a matter of principle. (If GitHub’s service level degradation is not enough to convince yourself.) I chose Codeberg, which is hosted in the EU, and I quote here from the bylaws preamble:
While the dominating software tools that made this collaboration possible were developed as Free and Open Software (a good example is “GIT”), the succeeding collaboration tools are proprietary online services of commercial companies, which are mostly operating under US law. This lead to the paradox situation that millions of volunteers create free knowledge, text contributions and software of immeasurable value while handing over its control to these commercial platforms.
https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/src/branch/main/en/bylaws.md#preamble
LLMs and agentic workflows will make you lose touch with your own code, and the knowledge that once gave you technological freedom will slowly erode away. And then you have been trapped, with a weakened ability to reason about and change your software without paying more for proprietary LLM services. The first hit’s always free, and the world is still being force fed its first hit.
For me, the bigger picture of free open source software is the freedom and sharing of true knowledge between human beings. Let the people remain in power of their own computing by continuing to understand and share technical recipes freely. We shouldn’t head for a future where we rely on proprietary services to modify and build free software, because then we are certainly no longer free.