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Comment by thedz | Hacker News Reader

> We now need to think about a backup plan in case Github management gets out of line.

This is a distributed source control system. Keep a clone of the repo somewhere. Your source code is now no longer bound to Github.

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That's not the only reason people use Github. It's the Facebook of programmers in some sense and it's got a critical mass that switching to something else is not practicable (not without some serious momentum).

"It's the Facebook of programmers"

Business Insider agrees.[1] Github, Inc. is now valued at $2 billion.

Right. Which means we have to worry about Github's management starting to think like Zuckerberg: "All your life is belong to us."

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/github-raises-200-million-wor...

I think this is an unfair jump because they do have a legitimate business model with enterprise revenue - they don't need to start owning your life to continue to exist.

Advertising is a higher margin business.

I'm pretty sure Advertising is about as low margin as it gets.

And Github users run ad blockers at a much higher rate than the general public

The "Facebook of programmers" is a great analogy. Because while the masses act like they cannot live without it, those of us who just don't use it really do not feel like we are missing anything in our lives.

There are other Git services. There are other source control mechanisms. There are other ways to do things. Just like you can actually leave Facebook, feel free to leave Github. Or stay. But make a conscious choice.

What about your issues, pull requests, visiblity of forks?

I think issues/wiki can be exported, no?

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