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Comment by darkamaul | Hacker News Reader

I've noticed that several projects on the front page today (and over the past few days) are migrating away from GitHub.

Is there any recent event or broader trend that explains this shift?

Ongoing availability issues, Microsoft's shoehorning of AI, GitHub's focus on migrating to Azure infrastructure rather than adding features and fixing shortcomings. If I had to guess.

... Training their own models out of your code...

If you're publishing your code anywhere, it's getting trained on. MS does not restrict themselves to only training on GH-hosted code.

The point still stands for private repos, and also not making the job easy for them.

They don't train on private repos, there has been no proof of that anyways

> If you're publishing your code anywhere, it's getting trained on

citation needed. first they need to know my code exists... spend time and traffic crawling it because it's sure as hell not going to be hosted on azure... probably get detected and banned.

No citation needed. It should be an assumption and thought as a malicious cybersecurity threat.

> It should be an assumption and thought as a malicious cybersecurity threat.

If you believe in absolute cybersecurity for anything you keep online boy I've got news for you. Literally all you can do is make it tougher but it will never be uncrackable. The degree of it depends on how much you can invest and suffer.

same here. codeberg makes in tougher so it's a measure.

Yet, not restricting themselves to train on permissively licensed code only.

The two ends of the spectrum, both source available and copyleft licensed code shouldn't be used for training, but who's listening.

Most people don't care about the AI being trained on their FOSS repos. If they did, they would have mass migrated when Microsoft announced it. The timing suggests that the downtime and the performance issues are definitely the irritants here.

This is not to say that people shouldn't care about AI training. I was disappointed by the public response when they announced it. The GH ToS has conditions that allow them to use your code, overriding its license. Even worse, that still applies if somebody else mirrors your code there from some other forge. And they don't stop at that. I have noticed that they just scrape off code from source registries like crates.io in the name of security. I would be surprised if they didn't use that too for training their AI.

I personally expected the AI stuff to be a fad that would go away quickly, and thus didn't get out the second they did that (for the same reason that distro-hopping is unhealthy). It's more a symptom of the frog recognising that okay yeah the temperature's grown definitely too high.

Zig’s announcement[0] might provide some insight

[0] https://ziglang.org/news/migrating-from-github-to-codeberg/

I'm personally very tired of shoving AI everywhere otherwise GitHub is okay-ish albeit it seems it performed much better when it was a rails website rather than a react "app".

My guess is it's a Summer of the Shark-esque phenomenon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_the_Shark

Not naming names but heard from contacts that it is currently a sh*t-show of politics internally right now at GitHub and no progress is being made/large parts of the platform are abandoned unless P0.

I suspect GitHub - and, to some extent, Microsoft at large - is going through something of a trust thermocline[1] event right now. There's been frustration brewing with GitHub as an open source platform for a while, but not enough for any one project to leave by itself; but over time enough has built up that various projects decided they had the last straw, and it's getting to be a bit viral via the HN front page.

I think it remains to be seen how large this moment actually is, but it's something I've been thinking about re: GitHub for a while now. Also, I suspect the unrest around Windows' AI/adware enshittification and the forced deprecation of Windows 10 are casting a shadow on everything Microsoft-ish at the moment, too.

[1] The original Twitter thread that brought this up as a concept is https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1588115310124539904.html. This is in the context of digital media outlets, but I think it's easy to see how it can apply more broadly. There are some other articles out there for the searching if you're interested.

https://sfconservancy.org/GiveUpGitHub/ Slightly outdated. Of course the root problem is Microsoft.

The new focus of GitHub is to harvest data for AI.

Everything else not important to them.

Honestly, I've been trying to cut down on the number of Microsoft development tools in my workflow because they are so drunk on the AI Kool-Aid that it's affecting the usability and reliability of their products in pretty much every other respect.

I don't really have a choice but to use Windows and Visual Studio 2022 for work, but I've dusted off my Sublime Text license and have been eyeing migrating my personal repositories to Codeberg.

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