GitHub flags repo, breaks Julia ecosystem, Github CEO fixes within the hour
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Well they control the platform and its Julia's fault for choosing them and hosting the entire repository and essential ecosystem on GitHub instead of self-hosting the essential repositories themselves. This already happens to all Github-hosted projects in general.
Ideally, in a self-hosted environment involving open-source projects, a trusted sys-admin of the project would be on-call and step in to fix the issue, rather than wait for support or even the GitHub CEO to step in and fix it for you.
Platform-wise, congratulations to GitHub for showing once again why free and open-source projects should be self-hosted using either GitLab, Gerrit, cgit or Gitea instead of being centralised in one platform.
We have been aware of the centralization issue generally, and in fact just this weekend, we released Julia 1.4, which has redesigned the internals of the package manager such packages can be served from our own infrastructure. There's already a plan for migration away from Github as the source that serves packages. For Julia 1.4 it needs to be turned on by the user, but going forward, the new infrastructure is likely to be the default.
We imagined many reasons for needing to do this to safeguard the long term stability of the Julia ecosystem. For example, an author may delete a key package they own, accidentally or for their own reasons (like the lpad case in javascript), or as we learnt in this case, packages can get accidentally flagged and break things.
Thankfully the Pkg team has been one step ahead on this.