Important open source projects should not use GitHub (2020)

Summary

Important open source projects should not use GitHub Published on 2020-10-23. Modified on 2022-09-01. Thousands of the worlds best open source projects are still hosting their code repositories on GitHub. Since Microsoft has purchased GitHub this has become a serious problem. It is no news that Microsoft purchased GitHub in 2018, everyone knows that. Yet despite that fact thousands of the worlds most important open source projects continue to host their code on GitHub. Microsoft is very actively purchasing important projects related to open source and in April 2020 it was announced that they had now also acquired npm, a JavaScript packaging vendor, for an undisclosed sum of money. Perhaps the younger generation don't know anything about the past "evils" of Microsoft and naively believe that Microsoft is now the good friend to open source, but the truth is that all these acquisitions of open source projects is a business tactic that is put in place to improve Microsoft's loosing position to open source. It is a matter of control. Some project developers only keep parts of the code in personal repositories, others haven't even got a backup but trust fully that GitHub will always have a working and current release of the latests commits. For years people have warned about the "dangerous" position of GitHub because it concentrates too much of the power to make or break the community in a single entity. Having Microsoft behind the steering wheel makes the situation much worse. Nobody in the world of open source or free software could ever have imagined uploading code to Microsoft just a decade ago. Microsoft where the archenemy of open source and free software in the nineties and they deployed all kinds of dirty tactics to keep other operating systems out of the market, especially dirty tactics against Linux. In the early 2000s the then CEO Steve Ballmer said: Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. And for many ...