GitHub is History

At least to me. Today was the day to remove all left repositories from GitHub. Afterwards I deleted my account.

You don’t need GitHub to handle your Git repositories. Git is federated and you can add remotes and/or remove them.

Why I Left

First their current CEO declared in an interview, that you are not a software developer, when you are not following The AI Con. I wrote about that in my blog post Leaving GitHub.

Only a week later the same guy announced he would step back from his position. And Microsoft did its best to add another nail to GitHubs coffin, they decided that it does not get a new CEO and will be integrated into their CoreAI organisation.

That move by Microsoft only affirmed my decision to leave GitHub behind. And I also decided, that I do not want to link to their AI con pages.

Tell GitHub To Delete Your Personal Data

As a citizen of the European Union I also demanded to delete information about me from their servers, that are not releated to crucial busines data, that need to be kept.

In Europe we do have the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This law gives citizen of the European Union a lot more rights how their data are allowed to be handled.

You can demand that GitHub deletes yoru personal data according to Art. 17 GDPR within one month with an email request to privacy@github.com and/or dpo@github.com.

Alternatives to GitHub

GitLab

Hosted on GitLab

You can do the same things as on GitHub, but so far they did not any stupid AI stuff or publish stupid things about developers who disagree with the AI slope.

I moved my personal repositories to GitLab right after Microsoft bought GitHub in 2018 and only kept mirrors on GitHub.

Self hosting GitLab

You can also run the GitLab community edition on your own infrastructure, it is availabe for several environments, see about.gitlab.com/install for details.

It is licensed under the MIT licencse.

Self Hosting with Forgejo

When you are able to run a self hosted environment, this might be a possible solution.

Forgejo is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later.

Codeberg

Codeberg is based on Forgejo. It is mantained by a public non-profit organisation that accepts donations and offers personal and company memberships to support them.

Services are offered for free and open source projects.

My company, ProOpenSource OÜ, applied for a company membership.

Author: Stefanie Janine Stölting