I did it. I gave up on GitHub. I moved out, and I don’t wanna look back anymore.
First, it’s not stable anymore. I cannot believe how the software development industry managed to do this. I mean, come on. We all look like a bunch of wankers. Please, remember the old times, like the 2000s. For example, a game company, let’s say Eidos Interactive creates a computer game called CM 03/04. They built the game, tested it, agreed it was ready, burned thousands of CDs with the game on them, and sold it. It was happening in a world where the majority of users didn’t have a proper internet connection. No upgrades, no patches, no error logging, nothing. It worked for years, and became a legend.
Today GitHub has the best developers, best engineers, best LLMs, but this is the summary we have:
All due respect, I don’t accept this.
On the other hand, GitHub is neither a free service nor a charity fund. It’s a company that makes profit. They’re very capitalist when it comes to using other people’s code to train AI. Sometimes, they use small tricks to get what they want.
I’ve been using GitHub since 2012 and I feel like an idiot. I would never forgive what GitHub did. I’ve paid year after year, and this is what I get in return.
Also, I don’t buy the court results that say using other people’s data (like books, code, etc.) is fair use. There is a race between countries to get more political and economic power, and I do believe that many courts are just playing three monkeys.
They’ll say it’s fair use as long as they win the race.
So, I moved from GitHub to my homelab. My server, my hardware, my data. I have serious trust issues that I should have had for years. That’s why this is not a critique of GitHub, even though it looks like that. It’s a critique of myself. It’s a critique of us.
For now, I’ve moved all of my private repos to my Forgejo instance. I’ve also cancelled my subscription including Copilot. Then I remembered what I actually needed; simplicity.
I also have other services on my homelab, and I plan to expand it over time.
I still have some public repositories that nobody really uses on GitHub. I’m open to suggestions but I don’t wanna keep them on my homelab server, because it’s not open to public internet access, because of trust issues.
For me, the main idea of this post is: do not trust companies, especially big tech, when it comes to privacy or security.
Be suspicious.
Read more about security and privacy. Read more from independent blog writers, not developers who write blog posts like company ambassadors.
So, fuck you GitHub!