I wouldn’t lump Github with Facebook or Twitter because, at its core, it’s just a plain jane git server. If you stick to core features, you can exfiltrate your repos at any time in seconds and move them someplace else. And you can interact with Github’s git server with open-source, fully documented tools.
It’s the extended features Github offers that lock you in - the social media stuff and advanced git tools. So if you want to give Microsoft the finger, use Github only for basic services.
Me, I host all my repos there, and I use them also to host videos and as Linux distro repositories (apt and rpm) for my packages: I make it my duty to use up as many Microsoft resources as possible without paying them a dime and without giving them any edge to lock me in.
Well clearly it’s not ideal. And it’s not for everybody. But for the stuff I do - small, non-controversial projects that are mostly bug-free because I’m a very good programmer 😉 - as a place to stick repositories, it’s fine. Most people who find bugs in my projects tend to email me anyway.
Also, when issues are opened on my GitHub repos, I fix them and them summarize them in the Changelog, in the commit comments and in the code comments too. So even if GitHub suddenly closed the bug tracker, it would be inconvenient going forward, but I wouldn’t lose the history of why the code is the way it is.
Like I says, it’s not ideal and you have to take extra steps to make your repos Microsoft-proof. But I really do enjoy the idea of making Microsoft pay to host my shit without getting anything of value from me in return.
Not really. All my stuff is GPL-2, GPL-3 or MIT. They can have all my stuff for all I care, because everybody can have all my stuff. As for exploiting my usage patterns, I never hit their website, and all my commits are done at midnight every day with a cron job. So they don’t even get to monetize that ☺️
It’s worth noting that this forum is an attempt to collect cases where essential public interaction is forced into a walled garden. It’s perhaps rare that a government would force the general public to connect to MS Github. I should probably clarify that on the sidebar.
It’s also worth noting that the EU has a public git instance which they self-host. So it implies that there is a reasonable chance that a gov would push Github onto people.
(update: just noticed the FCC exposes the public to Github)