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Comment by sallveburrpi | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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