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Comment by neya | Hacker News Reader

Good. I want everyone to do this. I want to see the downfall of Microsoft. Time and again they've proved that anything they touch can't be trusted nor reliable. I am tired of this. They even bully their users - on Mac OS, GitHub desktop doesn't respect the word "no". It installs all kinds of helpers and acts like borderline spyware. Someone created an issue about it on Github and the MS employees told them to fuck off in corporate[1]

I am even considering hosting my own GIT server myself. Some of our deployments got affected multiple times in the last 6 months alone we were really caught off-guard. Thankfully our clients were understanding of the GitHub outages. But, this should not be the baseline. Reliability should not be the cost of doing business.

[1] https://github.com/creativefoundrysg/desktop#an-open-letter-...

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Thanks for a good laugh, FOSS in 2026 is nothing without the money of big corporations, including Microsoft.

Everyone spent years talking against GPL, business friendly licenses like MIT and Apache were the way of the future, not viral and co.

Now we are here, most projects have their key contributors working at corporations like Microsoft, or gladly getting their acquisition money to pay the VCs, embrace your business friendly licenses.

So, the solution is just "suck it up and deal with it"? We pay good money to Microsoft for some of our client orgs and defending this level of piss poor reliability is just cope in the name of support for FOSS. I don't see why this should be accepted. This is mainly because their shitstorm that's Azure.

Hardly any different from dealing with Amazon or Google clouds problems and support, other FOSS darlings.

I'm hosting Forgejo for my homelab and couldn't be happier. I have everything running in containers with dind for CI/CD. Most of my workflows just worked with minimal changes. YMMV and this is far from an enterprises' needs but it's working great so far for my needs.

My friend group also moved to self hosted forgejo. Couldn’t be happier and then I don’t have LLMs training on my code.

Thank you, just looking at it. Looks awesome so far. Thanks so much!

>Good. I want everyone to do this

Every other free service would die nearly instantly, so maybe only want useful things to move to other services.

>I am even considering hosting my own GIT server myself.

It's mostly a good idea.... but, with the current security apocalypse we seem to be under making sure your own shit doesn't get pwned is a full time job. The level of security hostility on the internet recently has reached numbers I've never seen before. RCE's dropping about every day, more targeted scans than I've ever seen in my life, swarms of AI bots breaking into services.

Running an up to date self hosted Gitea server takes like 5 minutes a week.

I mean, last year, but if you're updating once a week now, that means you've had 6 days to get exploited.

Nope. Take a look at gitea update frequency.

Missing the point completely. It doesn't matter how often they update, it matters how fast attackers find exploits.

> making sure your own shit doesn't get pwned is a full time job.

Not if you didn't vide code your architecture. I have a 7 year box running without a single incident (touchwood) because 7 years ago we didn't have vibe coding and I used a compiled language. To use PHP for anything serious in 2026 is just insane, let's be honest.

As an idea, do you think an enterprise only Git host would work.

Say annual contracts start at 100k minimum and everyone gets a dedicated support engineer.

You get your own rack. None of this degraded shared capability nonsense.

Does that seem like a solid business ?

Is that Bitbucket?

Both GitLab and Bitbucket still offer free repos for hobbyists.

What I'm thinking of is a company that exclusively caters to the enterprise.

You get a support engineer and they help on everything, migration, CI/CD, hosting, etc.

Nothing goes down without a solid 3 page write up.

I think so, but, only if you differentiate in the privacy angle (think Proton vs GMail) and this is similar to how most enterprise GIT offerings work, too. The risk is GitHub offering to existing orgs who are already on Office 365 a self-hosted version (I think they already do). So, this business model will fail in the SWOT analysis itself. Still, there might be some looking to exit MS office ecosystem, it might make more sense for them.

It’s a dream, I don’t have the money to do it.

But it could work as a franchise model too, maybe I just refer your company to an affiliate located in your country of choice.

For example, most European clients would pick German locations.

If I was in the EU I’d be applying for a grant to build on the idea. Their’s no rational reason for European companies to fully trust Microsoft to act in good faith.

No. You'd be competing with multiple mature cloud services plus Github Enterprise Cloud/self-hosted plus multiple open source options.

I don't need or want a dedicated support engineer for my VCS, I need it to integrate with all the bullshit products I already have, tick off the compliance and governance checkboxes for the suits, give me controls so SWEs do less dumb shit and above all, not be something I have to think about except at contract renewal time.

I'm just not going to trust a rando to run all that for me and get it right, especially not at that price point.

Thank you for the blunt feedback.

Ideally this would be DevOps as a service. But I’d have to charge an absurd amount of money to do it right.

Back to the drawing board

Github desktop is such a hot mess that I instead choose to continue to suffer with SourceTree. Sourcetree annoys me for reasons I still cannot articulate after a decade, but it at least tends to actually work without being too intrusive as far as updating, doesn't randomly derp out on credentials, and is super handy when trying to visualize janky branch patterns of dev teams.

Just use Sublime Merge, it's probably the best GUI for Git there is.

Here try one of the others:

https://git-scm.com/tools/guis

SourceGit is fantastic:

https://github.com/sourcegit-scm/sourcegit

GitKraken has been good in my experience with it for many years

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