GitHub Import Statistics
monitor.gitlab.net
monitor.gitlab.net
The whole boycott was nonsense anyway. Microsoft has only agreed to buy GitHub; they can't actually buy and own it for about 6 months. So even if you had a legit fear of Microsoft, why would you even bother yet? Anything of importance on GitHub is going to take a while to move over anyway which is why I suspect the majority of these "moves" were people moving over repos that no one cares about.
Microsoft's cloud business is up and coming and is already worth many billions of dollars. They are not going to jeopardize user trust, which could harm Azure, by messing with your little GitHub project.
I think the biggest concern is just a lack of trust that Microsoft will fuck things up out of incompetence rather than malice.
Another rationale is that, even if you reason it through and conclude that Microsoft isn't going to screw it up at all, the mere risk of GitHub being a SPOF is enough to support some alternatives. That might be a risk that existed pre-acquisition, but it's definitely come to attention.
Also, GitLab has been getting better and better for awhile and capitalized on this really well from a marketing standpoint; let's give them some credit instead of assuming it's purely a negative reaction to GitHub and Microsoft.
This is important to remember. Some people were also openly hesitant to GitHub, but used it anyway due to its network effect. This seems like a perfect moment to reevaluate.
Actually, not really. The importer is very good, issues and PR/MRs get moved over. The only adjustments have to be to CI if you used Travis.
Gitlab is exemplary there. Mozilla is very good at it as well. Another company I've recently found out about and gained a massive amount of respect for is Buffer. https://buffer.com/transparency
If a group of people get annoyed with a product they will flock to the next available one and drive that business to become competition. So while you don't get that instant gratification of being pissed and getting results you do force companies to make changes.
People suffered through IE for years, and when Chrome came around it practically took IE's market share overnight because people were so willing to blindly abandon IE.
The big announcement was that they have entered into an agreement to acquire GitHub, after slogging through (perhaps) months of legal, accounting, and regulatory paperwork.
There very well may be more bumps in that graph, as the news sinks in, and when the deal actually closes.
EDIT: is/was, I've heard they turned some of it down supposedly.
Trust is easily lost and is hard to earn.
1. Embrace Git by buying Github
2. Extend Git, fork git to add Github specific features (Basically integrate https://hub.github.com/ directly into git)
3. Extinguish, by gradually making Github incompatible with the original git. Then stop development on the forked git and push everyone to a proprietary product.
They are not going to slowly change git to the point where no one else can use it. Git is opened sourced, by owning GitHub they still can't control Git anyway.
Let's not forget GitHub already has enterprise products...
Regardless Microsoft has brought in many acquisitions and didn't ruin them. LinkedIn was kept separate and beyond some integration was left untouched. Same with the vast majority of game studio acquisitions. Let's not forget the Xamarin acquisition has been a huge boon to .Net developers as well as open source initiatives.
Microsoft has new leadership. Most of these arguments I'm seeing on HN are all referring to things that happened under much older leadership. This goes to show Microsoft still has some trust building work to do but at the same time they shouldn't be written off either.
It might just be about github no longer being independent.
Or it might more to do with the $7.5 billion sale price, and a wish not to join in a game of "you have to be on github because everyone will look for you on github because everyone else is on github".
(So much the same reason as some people leave Facebook: a wish not to be someone else's product.)
This might mostly reflect the values of projects or single maintainers who place a super high priority on Microsoft-avoidance. Many more people might migrate though after waiting a while to see if Microsoft begins trying to push any agendas through GitHub.
I for one am super happy to stay with GitHub as long as no part of it starts to feel like there is any type of Azure agenda, VS agenda, etc. Keep my tooling, CI, deployment, etc., choices separate from the git platform, and I'm fine with it being a Microsoft subsidiary. The minute that changes, I'll move all my code.
https://monitor.gitlab.net/dashboard/db/github-importer?orgI...
They went from an avg of 0.2-0.5 to 2-5 per minute. That's 10x the repositories imported. I wonder how many repositories a new user usually brings in.
To me it looks to be up a decent bit, but less than you'd expect from a proper mass exodus event.
its not that i dont like github, i do. But keeping internet decentralized is important (imho).
Also given that I live in Turkey, government can block all github just because someone shares bad stuff about current leaders in gist. (ps. they did block google drive because someone posted some photographs/documents)
Many people here using somehow their own vps, just adding push-hook to sync with other github/gitlab is not a trivial thing.
tl;dr: push to your repo, sync with cloud providers' one.
The "mass exodus" from GitHub to GitLab: 10 days later
What’s important is open source.
Microsoft is an acceptable option to many still, no matter how bad it proves to be, over and again.