Yes, the code is replicated on thousands of machines around the web, but this concentration of control by a single company is extremely dangerous in my opinion.
The way events are unfolding these days, I'm really worried about what could happen.
Take for example Starlink and Ukraine... The USA threatened to shut down the internet service if Ukraine won't sign the rare minerals deal. A deal that would make Ukraine a colony of USA.
Starlink is a legitimate concern because in some places there were no other choice, hence a captive audience.
Take for example Gmail: I remember 10 years ago it was free even for companies up to 100 users, then 50, then 10, then 0... The same with Google Maps, before it was free and later, after reaching a large user base, they changed the terms and above a certain number of visits per month it is a paid service.
Nothing wrong with that of course, but once you are inside their services, they make it really difficult to change providers. It is possible, of course, but in some cases it requires a relevant effort and many prefer to pay after being lured with very different promises.
I recently read the story of how Google took over Yahoo! as a search engine, they used a "Troy horse" ... and when Yahoo! discovered what happened it was too late.
Back to Github and MS ... MS has a very long history of trying to boycott Linux in any way possible (and I also remember what they did to BeOS) ... I think these are very valid reasons not to trust them. They didn't buy GitHub because they're nice and want to help open source ... the first thing they did was kill the Atom IDE. VS is full of trackers,yes it is open source, but also a mean to steal data and information directly from the computer of the developer.
The main problem for me here is the lack of principles, values. The only principle they follow is to try to become overly rich in some way. The US companies have a long history of trying in every legal and almost legal way to avoid paying taxes.
Until a few years ago, Amazon was always in loss in Italy because they transferred the profits (as inflated costs) to their subsidiary in Ireland and the Italian taxpayers gave back every year millions of Euros to Amazon as tax credits. This is not capitalism ...
I wish there was a way to automatically mirror those things to Codeberg as a backup. For issues/PRs that shouldn't be too hard to do.
Truth is, GitHub has a whole suite of really great features that's hard to move. Especially for open sourced projects/communities
Launchpad.net offers project management and git code hosting and is run by a UK company (Canonical).
Are they still alive? i am somewhat hard-opponent of git, and still use bazaar - now breezy - as main repo storage, and only keep github as copy for PR, eh public relations, i.e. for jobhunt.
Are they still project-based? instead of person-based? It's the Person-based thing a-la-social-network that rocketed github into skies.. not git or MS
Would you be up for making recommendations?
https://european-alternatives.eu/
I self hosting almost everything, but for a complete suite of services take at look at Infomaniak : https://www.infomaniak.com/en
Protonmail (https://proton.me/mail) or Tutanota (https://tuta.com/) for end-to-end encrypted emails, Filen (https://filen.io/) for encrypted Cloud Storage
Infomaniak is great email.
Here’s the tweet: https://x.com/andyyen/status/1864436449942110660
Some have interpreted this as a political signal. The Intercept article provides additional context and takes a more critical view: https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-tru...
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one thing that seems tricky though, is smartphone OS software. Apple + Google is on like 99% of everything. i went few years with Sailfish, all fine.. but they support only 5y+ old devices, for a reason or another.. and i got tired of waiting, and switched to Android. hmmm
Thank you for the heads-up !
Also, it's not good that they do not have any status tracker that shows summary stats on uptime over the past, say, year so one can get a quick idea of how reliable the service was historically.
The status monitor only has entries for incidences from the past 7 days. It could have been down for 10 days a month ago, you wouldn't know this unless someone wrote about it.
_You_ know the service is new, but this isn't mentioned on the landing page either. They don't say something like "only 4 months old, public beta" - in that case I wouldn't feel negatively surprised.
I learned (the hard way) to have a plan b for everything. I'll study an emergency solution in case of a prolonged downtime.
I don't want to continue to contribute to making richer companies that try in every possible way to steal data and wealth from their customers and other nations with unfair behavior at the edge (or beyond the edge) of the law.
And if that is not enough to also use every possible way to manipulate the people's beliefs with false claims and evil psychological tactics.
This makes it hard for US-companies handling data of EU citizens to comply with EU privacy regulations. Some legal provisions have been made to facilitate this, but, to answer your question, what changed recently is that the Trump administration recently effectively incapacitated the "Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board" that was central to these legal provisions.
Above is my interpretation of matters, for a large part based on posts by a Dutch expert in these matters, Bert Hubert. In particular see this post: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/you-can-no-longer-base-you... and this news article it links to: https://noyb.eu/en/us-cloud-soon-illegal-trump-punches-first...
This site is great for finding alternatives to any piece of software (not just OSS)
https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-tru...
> Until corporate Dems are thrown out, the reality is that Republicans remain more likely to tackle Big Tech abuses.
Based on their comment it seems like they're pro-left, anti-liberal more than anything. They lament the Dem party's decision to reject Bernie in favor of corporate Democrats
They never once promoted Trump though
If you have the time and are interacting with the account, take the second to change it away from gMail. Insisting on doing them all immediately is setting up a Herculean task that'll almost certainly leave you demoralized. This gets your most-used (and presumably most important) accounts first,and feels much smaller and more manageable.
After 6 (or 18, whenever) months of this you can summon some motivation to change over the last 20 accounts and be done with it.
If the point is to avoid US companies this won’t be useful, but if the point is to avoid Google specifically, it is an option.