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Comment by Fice | Hacker News Reader

This is scary. For increasingly many potential contributors a project effectively does not exist if it is not on GitHub. And, being a huge centralized service, GitHub is very susceptible to censorship (e.g. repos being taken down via DMCA or Russia blocking GitHub until they started to cooperate with the censors). I see this dependence as very bad and dangerous for the free software movement. Should we even consider convenience of a service that has serious ethical issues?

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Why is it scary? Is it that hard to move to bitbucket, gitlab, or another alternative git host if needed?

It's not hard, IMO.

But it would be nice if these critical projects created gitlab or bitbucket mirrors.

This is not about how hard or easy it is to move from GitHub. What scares me is that it is increasingly hard to participate in the open source/free software community without using GitHub, and it is increasingly hard to find contributors for your own project if you are not willing to host it there.

Why is it scary to use Github? Is there some hidden cost that people aren't aware of?

The programming community became globally dependent on a single commercial company. Using GitHub would mean contributing to that dependence and monopolization even more.

Is anyone really dependent when the cost to switch to a different provider is low? You haven't given a good reason.

It's not just about moving data from one provider to another. GitHub is not simply a hosting service, it's a large centralized social network, and the cost of switching from it includes reduced project visibility and disconnection from the community.

These may be issues for smaller projects, but I don't feel that either visibility or community is a problem for a project like Python. They have the luxury of going wherever they want and people will follow.

> repos being taken down via DMCA or Russia blocking GitHub until they started to cooperate with the censors

Is this not the case with other hosts? If Gitlab got a DMCA notice, would they not be forced to comply? I don't think this is a good argument against Github.

Being removed from one of many interchangeable hosting services is one thing. Being removed from the one central service that everyone around insists on using is another. GitHub, due to it's extreme popularity and centralized nature, is becoming the global gatekeeper for the programming community.

Bitbucket does exist though.

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