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Comment by mindcrash | Hacker News Reader

Because they know Forgejo is starting to get attention from major players and thus becoming competitive, and hosting your own CI infrastructure will make completely moving away from GitHub all that easier - If you don't really care about the metadata all it pretty much takes is moving git repositories with their history.

Or shortly summarized: lock in through pricing.

Pretty sure this will explode straight in their faces though. And pretty damn hard.

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How can you lock in through charging money? Seems it’s like the opposite and they are charging because people are already locked in and they can or am I misreading your comment?

Microsoft "suddenly" does not seem to want you to run your own CI, which is a key part of running your own SCM. And this decision miraculously happens the moment a lot of big orgs are looking at self-hosting a cost effective (because open source) near 1:1 alternative to GitHub (=Forgejo).

So they make CI a bit cheaper but a future migration to Forgejo harder.

In fact they could easily pull off some typical sleazy Microsoft bullshit and eventually make it a shit ton harder to migrate out of GitHub once you migrated back in.

The idea is that they let you stay locked in for free. They dissuade people from making their CI pipeline forge-agnostic by charging you if you if you take steps to not be dependent on them. This means they can keep charging in other areas, and keep people in GitHub so that it stays dominant. Dominance is something that can be used to keep people in the Microsoft ecosystem, keep GitHub as the place where code goes so they have training data for LLMs, and dominance can simply be cashed in down the line.

I don’t know if that’s actually why they’re doing this, but it sounds plausible.

If you make running your own runners as expensive as running on Github's runners on top of the cost of actually hosting the runners, then if you are currently on Github and not able to migrate off immediately, the price conscious decision is to migrate runners into Github. But then, its even harder if you ever decide to migrate your whole operation out.

Now, if you are already looking at migrating, its also potentially a kick in the butt to do it now. But if you aren’t, the path of least resistance—or at least, the path of least present recurring cost—is a path to a greater degree of lock-in.

I don't think Forgejo is competitive in the markets GitHub makes most of their money from, nor does it seem Forgejo developers want it to be.

Where does GitHub even make most of their money? Their compliance posture makes them a non-starter for any regulated industries (which is atypical for a Microsoft property, generally MS is the market leader for compliance in all of their products).

Places might be officially regulated, but neither government agencies, healthcare, finance or defense industries are as strict as you think. People have to get stuff done, and most are usually quite incompetent in these protected industries.

Microsoft’s sales reps know this.

Given that a lot of places that deal with money use them, I find your comment quite interesting and would like to learn more :)

The easiest way is to compare GitHub's compliance report list with, say, Atlassian Bitbucket.

https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-cloud@latest/organizat...

https://www.atlassian.com/trust/compliance/resources

Representatives from the Dutch government recently had a chat with representatives from Forgejo because they are quite interested in migrating their SCM infrastructure from Github to Forgejo.

And trust me, they are running a lot of public and private repositories.

And there are many more orgs and govs throughout Europe doing similar things because there's a (growing) zeitgeist here that the Trump administration nor any American SaaS company can be trusted. This started, by the way, after Microsoft suspended the ICJ from using Microsoft 365 on orders from the White House.

Can confirm.

I have seen this sentiment more and more, which is welcome to me as it’s a drum I have been banging for 15 years.

I have never had so many empathetic conversations than I have recently.

Sounds familiar!

Everybody now is like "Hey, we can take something like Kubernetes which is open source and is backed by a worldwide community, and you know like OpenStack which is open source and is backed by a worldwide community and we can build our own computing platform and deploy services and online communities and stuff on top of that"

And I was like "Wait, you guys are realizing that NOW?!? I've been an activist and part of a movement urging you all to try and be less dependent on US Big Tech and focus more on decentralization for YEARS"

Like you I am really happy things seem to get rolling now, though :)

The Dutch government represenrative mentioned contacts with French colleagues about this also.

Not sure why you think forgejo is competition and not Gitlab.

> Or shortly summarized: lock in through pricing.

how would increasing price make you locked in more ?

> If you don't really care about the metadata all it pretty much takes is moving git repositories with their history.

moving PR/CI/CD/Ticket flow is very significant effort, as in most companies that stuff is referenced everywhere. Having your commits refer ticket ID from system that no longer exists is royal PITA

> Having your commits refer ticket ID from system that no longer exists is royal PITA

just rewrite the short links in your front-end to point to the migrated issues/PRs. write a redirect rule for each migrated issue/PR, easy

hard-coded links in commit messages are annoying, you can redirect in the front-end too but locally you'd have to smudge/clean them on local checkout/commit

I would keep repos on GH but use Jenkins though.

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