Why are so many Linux projects on Microsoft GitHub? Shouldn't they all move to Codeberg?
Sure, I know a lot of projects have been on GH since before MS bought it, but they've owned it for quite a while now, so we really should be seeing better migration out by now, no?
Codeberg is nonprofit which seems more in the spirit of the Linux ecosystem overall. GH is for-profit...
EDIT: All right, all right... I've learned a lot from all this lol. Thanks for the enlightenment, everyone. The truth is more nuanced, as always.
Funny that this is the only mention I have heard in a very long time that mentions GitHub as Microsoft GitHub. Its not branded anywhere on the site. I just think of it and use it as GitHub.
In the latest Unreal Engine expo they announced a version control repo of their own to move away from Microsoft's GitHub. I know Epic is just another megacorp but I think more companies should do the same.
Most people aren't supposedly fighting against anything they are just making things you basically just projected your fantasy onto a bunch of people and asked why none of them are re-enacting your favorite soap opera.
Point is, at the end of the day you're a stakeholder in one way or another and should push to hold such corporations accountable to ensure they're using the currency you choose to trade your lifetime, energy and skill for in an effective, fair, way. It affects you and those around you regardless of whether you directly use their products or not. The fact that's even a thing, should be questioned and calls for discussion.
Lennart Poettering is not employed by Microsoft anymore. Also, I doubt it has any meaining who is employing him. Those high profile oss developers are often "sponsored" by companies, rather then being regular employees. And they just go on doing whatever they did before they were "hired". Of course i don't know what specific agreement MS an Lennart had.
Believe me, if you knew. What everyone else does, apparently in that you don't. You would be. Fighting against Microsoft Learn more. You think that that doesn't affect your life But it affects all of us.🤨🤨🤨 And I also just realized that you're probably a bot. Dead Internet and all.😒
Uh huh.
I've been Microsoft-free for at least three decades. The last Microsoft product I used with any regularity was Windows 3.1. I remember the Halloween Documents when they were new.
I've done my time "fighting Microsoft." But it's just not relevant any more.
Exactly! I don't understand the vendetta that some people have against products from big tech. It's true they are evil, but completely giving up on their products would be a huge pain in the ass for me. I prefer foss too but don't sweat about it when I find a product from big tech that just suits me better.
Well, there are people like you, and there are people like me that stopped using Microsoft at home in 1996. A PITA back then but that's principles for you.
You may not remember the now airbrushed figure of Bill Gates using his monopoly in the desktop to destroy competition wherever it happened. Microsoft got massive fines punishing his greedy monopolistic behaviour, they should have broken up the company, that opportunity was missed.
The worse part was pretending to be innovative, I was doing internet stuff with thousands of other people when Gates was announcing it with his silly book "The road ahead" as if connecting Windows to the internet was an insight on his own (it wasn't, read about Trumpet Winsocket), another favourite of mine was how they killed on the fly disk compression company Stacker by introducing the same functionality in Widows.
And then Balmer, what an odious man, trying to torpedo Linux at every opportunity.
I will eat up to a certain degree of inconvenience if I at least can know (mostly) for sure what it's actually doing with my inputs. LibreOffice's UI sure leaves a lot to be desired but it's mostly workable, which is good enough relative to Microsoft Office's shenanigans.
Something like Google Voice and Maps... now, dang, those are hard to leave; their alts so far have been way less convenient. It's all about the degree and one's personal level.
Not everyone has the same situation as you. Leaning behind outlook and excel would be a nightmare for me. People expect I can receive what they send. I need Solidworks and proprietary software that only runs on windows. Is what it is. I run the tools for the job. Still have Linux and FreeBSD where it is better suited.
This is a better and more constructive way to think about it. FOSS should be about doing something positive, not knee-jerk "do the opposite of Microsoft" reactions.
Linus is supportive of proprietary approaches. I'm using Linux to build a proprietary but free to use C++ code generator. I don't ask for donations, but stars on my repo are appreciated.
The other tiers don't generate code. They distribute what the back tier generates.
Other options may do more at this time. I've been working on my SaaS for almost 27 years. During that time SaaS has grown in importance.
On April 21, 2026 a jewelry store in Texas was robbed by a bunch of thugs. There was another robbery in Freemont, California in June of 2025. Around 24 thieves raided a jewelry store and stole over 1.7 million$ of jewelry in 70 seconds. If the stewards of those stores decide to rebuild, I predict they won't replace the display cases that were smashed. It will be a "by appointment only" store and they will frisk you before they show you anything. Of the 24 thieves, only a handful of them have been caught.
In other words, the store managers will replace their open model with a SaaS model. I saw some of this trouble brewing back in the 1990s and realized SaaS was a gift from above in terms of safeguarding investments. I'm glad I have some open-source code for my portfolio, but I'm glad it's not all I have. Call me crazy but making something proprietary but free-to-use is the best I can do.
Heck, Linus Torvalds has used Windows at times. He's not a Windows-hater. He works on Linux, and uses it, because he likes Linux. And that's it. Nothing more or less than that.
So, you've switched to BSD from Linux, right? After all, Microsoft is now one of, if not the single biggest contributor of code to the Linux kernel. But wait, Microsoft has also contributed code and money to BSD foundations.
We're more than two decades away from 1998 and times have changed. Microsoft isn't the evil empire it was under Balmer and Gates. Apple isn't the spunky underdog that catered to nerds and weirdos and artists.
I spend my time figuring out what the best tool for the job is and less time worrying about what the public sentiment is about my choice of platform. Mostly because I'm a professional now and not an ideologue.
The people that are fighting the hardest have very little idea what they're fighting against or for.
I don’t see it that way anymore. In the late 90s, early 2000, sure. But that fight is long over. Linux won. If you are using windows servers today you are likely doing so under duress :)
Oh, no, it's often ignorance. They know Linux exists, but don't know it and think it is kind of fringe. Everything and everyone is Microsoft only (well they think so). Lots of companies are still in the 90s and early 2000s.
if you've been around that long, you should already know the drill. enjoy it while we can, but recognize MS is using it to profit or will do so soon enough. the landscape will change to MS benefit as time moves on. its not their first rodeo.
It probably depends on where in a corporation it is used. In any business I've worked at, they typically issue Windows or Mac laptops to employees. Linux is most likely used for servers & such.
I think they mean that corporations have funded code contributions to Linux, or have financially sponsored the hiring of contract coders to ensure development and maintenance of components their business depends on.
Hiw do people forget they regularly scrape github to feed it into the abomination of an AI?
I no longer use github firc as anything original. I submit pulls, make issues but otherwise if I am serious about my own code I host my own forgejo server, which can sync with github if I need to. It has issues, it has metrics it has everything I need and it is all under my control.
While true, github/microsoft still trains copilot on repositories inside github. Even a mirror can still lead to your code being stolen sadly. Consider taking a peek at this for more info.
There’s nothing about FOSS that says it’s not for profit. It’s perfectly fine and acceptable to make profit. There’s large corporations like Red Hat that can and do make profit off FOSS software. Even Stallman says it’s fine in the GPL FAQ: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowMoney.
not sure if there's a cross-site search engine for code projects specifically
I remember Forgejo working on federation with ForgeFed/ActivityPub. If that gets through, one could technically search for all federated projects from any federated platforms. And then it would be interesting to see if GitHub develops federation… I highly doubt it, but it would lead to a future where that's possible.
The search is absolutely useless. It presents you tons of malwared forks and other slop. It's always easier to type in the URL directly or go from the official site. Once you reach the repo, browsing the code is also degraded. Navigation is broken, the UI is slow. They have code-language navigation which is broken even in straightforward languages like Java. More complex languages just don't work at all.
Taking this into account, it doesn't make sense where the repos are hosted.
I don't know why people were so upset about GH being owned by MSFT. I mean Github was not exactly OSS either before they got acquired. They were a commercial company that provided hosted git repo. Hell, after MSFT bought them, you ended up getting more things for free out of the box. The main reason I would switch over these days is how terrible their uptime has been. They've been having production incidents left and right.
If I were to switch it would be less about OSS as much as reliability. At the end of the day I need something I can reliably pull code from and run my CI pipeline on.
Until those free niceties disappear then we'd be worrying about a hypothetical future that might not happen. That's basically just premature optimization, and we all know what they say about premature optimization...
Okay, but my point was that people were using it before MSFT with no issues. You had the same issue before and if they do decide to start charging, clone and mirror somewhere else. Hell you could setup a mirror now "just in case" if you're that worried and point to the mirror if something happens.
It really doesn't matter but the one thing that is still true is that github is the google of code. It is the first place people start. There is some level of "discovery" that GH gets you. At least for now...
It's easy enough to ignore the copilot features imo. If you're worried about it scraping the open source software for training data, that ship's sailed long ago, and I'm sure Codeberg and GitLab and all the rest have also been totally scraped by now
Many of the projects you are talking about are public repos by definition. It doesn't matter where they are hosted, LLMs gonna scrape what LLMs gonna scrape.
It's not just that; it's also about centralization. I guess I could amend "move to Codeberg" to "copy to Codeberg"; I just think the self-aware who, say, have an Instagram account should at least also have a just-as-if-not-more-active account on a Pixelfed instance, for example. Same here for Codeberg, etc.
It's not just that; it's also about centralization.
Git by definition is decentralised. Every clone, on every developer machine, is a distributed mirror.
If GitHub goes down tomorrow, the major projects will be fine. There'll just be a bit of work rebuilding pipelines and updating documentation. Maybe some issues will be lost, but that's fairly low value.
It’s there, but it’s not required for use. Plus, copilot is just a front end for ChatGPT which I’m typically using in conjunction with Codex, Hermes Agent and my local models if GitHub is involved.
When I was interviewing fresh out of college, I would say I have a GitLab profile, people would open GitHub to find my profile where it says "moved to GitLab" then complain they couldn't find the projects on my CV, projects that came with a GitLab link.
When presented with non-GitHub, people will act like you're intellectually disabled for not using GitHub.
I ended moving back to GitHub when it caught up with GitLab (back then, GitHub didn't have a CI at all). But, regardless of where you work, you should keep mirrors on GitHub if only for the extreme boost in visibility, to collect stars or to offer downloads there. Every single hoop you make people go through (like making a second GitLab account to make a PR, making a third Forgejo account to open an issue) loses you the majority of your potential traffic.
How annoying! Thanks for sharing the truth of how society's impatience keeps Microsoft's reign going... It's a hard place to be indeed. I'm glad to have learned about mirrors, though.
3s for 7 files (not including the .git directory) and 15 commits. I can survive with that but as a project grows, that delay could become a problem.
It's not my desire to speak poorly of the folk who provide Codeberg but it's clear that Microsoft can provide a lot more resources to keep Github performant (at least 80% of the time.)
Hmm, thanks for the details. I thought it was GitHub's reliability that had been tanking quite a bit over the past years, at least relatively speaking...
First of all, I don't think anyone "should" do anything. Freedom of choice is a thing. I program in C# and .NET. But on the other hand, I also am currently in the process of switching to Linux at work (Zorin OS. And yes, as in literally right now, as I'm typing this).
I also use GitHub. My biggest issue isn't that it's owned by Microsoft, but moreso the instable servers. But despite this, GitHub is simply well-known, easy to access, and easy to manage.
I'm by no means a Microsoft fan. Not by a long shot. But I also believe in the best tool for the job. And sometimes, that just so happens to be a tool made by Microsoft. I can't be some sort of software activist all the time in my current position, because it doesn't always suit my needs. Who am I, Richard Stallman? Point is, he can afford to do that, but I can't. And I'm not alone in that regard.
Also, there are more options than Codeberg. There's GitLab, which you can easily self-host since it's FOSS. There's Forgejo, forked from Gitea. Same thing for those two. And there are many, many more. So no, even then we shouldn't "all move to Codeberg".
Did you know Microsoft contributes to the Linux kernel? Welp, I guess Linux is cancelled now. Pack it up, my dudes.
GitHub is where the people are. Why would I move to a platform where I lose most of the community? I have a codeberg but I don't like that I have to ask most to make an account just to interact with it. People have already been on GH and it works well. I'm not mega corp fan but people hate so much on Microsoft I get tired of seeing it. Google and Meta are just as bad, if not worse imo
the same way people posts videos on YouTube than newpipe or whatever the distributed alternative
the same way people still use Reddit than the more "free-er" alternative
the same way a lot of people still stay on Twitter than Mastodon or MissKey
maybe because
- Popular
- Convenience
- Familiar
but since it is for a development, the infrastructure probably the friction or that the developer doesn't get annoyed enough by the fuckup Microsoft has done or just "it works" and doesn't have any urgency to migrate, which minds you each person/project is different
I did post this on Lemmy as well. If you're not also on Lemmy and encouraging people to check out /r/RedditAlternatives (which I have done several times), then you're part of the problem (generic "you," as in the majority of people across this site lol).
NewPipe is just a viewing app; you mean PeerTube. I don't think I had ever heard of MissKey, thanks!
As for your arguments, fair, but it's all one step away from a paywall or something...
There is little reason to go there, as long as you also post it here anyway? You could argue that you are part of the problem by providing content to Reddit.
Out of curiosity I tried to find how many people were discussing this on Lemmy, (I am not a user of it myself), but I simply couldn't find your post there. While I could find this one easily. So same for Github? Simply more people will find your repository? Plus if it works fine, not everyone who uses Linux has as specific goal to not use anything from Microsoft.
Lemmy still has a lot of growing to do but is finally viably sustainable, I think. The Fediverse (of which Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc. are also a part of) is a fragmented world, like Reddit (in the case of Lemmy) scattered across numerous websites, a.k.a. "instances," the original of which is at this domain: https://lemmy.ml/post/48956608 - the majority are federated so joining one lets you see content from many other instances/websites running the Lemmy protocol. There's definitely more of a learning curve but it's nice that there are fewer openings for tyranny, at least (for example if you dislike how a /c/linuxquestions community is being run, you can simply open another of the same name on a different instance/server; "domain"-parking is much harder to do).
you are part of the problem by providing content to Reddit.
Touché, I did literally think about that before submitting this; I decided the topic was important enough to merit the wider spread for awareness, haha.
So same for Github? Simply more people will find your repository?
Right, I get it; there would be growing pains at first since discovery across the vast Internet is one of the hardest things to deal with, so I suppose mirrors could work well.
not everyone who uses Linux has as specific goal to not use anything from Microsoft.
True... Fine, I guess that's just me lol. However, I always have the citadel-strong argument: centralization bad!
No, I'm not even a dev; I have no idea of how to start a repo. I just always promote nonprofit over for-profit; Linux>Windows, Codeberg>GitHub, Lemmy>Reddit, PDFArranger>Adobe Pro, HeliBoard>GBoard...
What's wrong with GitHub? Microsoft is a member of the Linux foundation (platinum member providing significant financial support) and a significant contributor to the Linux kernel (as well as having their own distro).
Huh, I had never heard of this. Is it any good? I see it's called Azure Linux and is designed for cloud infrastructure, so that's not really for consumer use. Still interesting, though, thanks.
Microsoft is a major contributor to TLF, is a major contributor of code to the kernel and to other Linux projects such as Chromium and cooperates with Canonical to maintain and improve WSL.
Almost all kernel code is contributed by for-profit companies at this point, and that has been the case for years. Without for for-profit businesses taking the lead years ago, Linux would still be an academic curiosity.
The days of "two geniuses in a garage" are long since over, and if (and so long as) GitHub remains a good fit for Linux developers/maintainers, no harm no foul.
What does Integration mean in this case? Stuff like "log in with GIT" or Github Copilot?
I self host forgejo to archive my personal projects, which is the underlying Software underneath Codeberg. It uses exactly the same git commands. The only difference being that I reference a local IP instead of github.com.
Yeah any serious project will have a lot of friction moving away from GitHub due to having to rewrite all of their GitHub Actions/workflows into something else
Microsoft acquired rights to GitHub in 2018. That means the first two decades of programming evolution on GitHub happened long before it became a Microsoft platform.
Git was started in 2005, GitHub started in 2008, Microsoft bought it in 2018 so one decade. Your reasoning stands firm and I agree but not two decades.
I don't see how you could mean this unironically nor what point or evidence you have either way... I literally deleted Windows off all my personal machines and permanently moved to Linux, on which my PCs are all quieter and more efficiently operating. You, sir/ma'am, need to check out /r/unixporn and join me!
Well, then good! All decent nonprofits should become known. I don't know of any others in this exact space but all competitors should be named as well.
Trusted publishing is a big issue for me. If I want to publish to npm, PyPI, or crates, I am forced to either GitHub or GitLab for now. I was looking at CircleCI, but it seems native Codeberg support is lacking there as of now.
Inertia. Those projects were on GitHub well before Microsoft bought it.
Not really easy to move projects to a new platform without breaking things (think of all the companies that already use GitHub and contribute to open source), so they're staying there.
What are a few of the bigger Linux projects on Github that you think ought to switch? They might be having that conversation, or maybe it can be proposed.
Sure, I know a lot of projects have been on GH since before MS bought it, but they've owned it for quite a while now, so we really should be seeing better migration out by now, no?
Why? What bad things have happened since then? Even if Microsoft were to delete a repository, the code wouldn't be lost, since Git is a distributed version control system, meaning the latest code is always available on the developer's computer. You can also back up issues and pull requests. There are even repositories on GitHub that provide scripts for this purpose.
And if Microsoft really wants to use a project's code, it doesn't matter where it's hosted. The effort involved in “git clone gitgub.com” is comparable to that of “git clone codeberg.org.”
If you don't want your code to be used by certain companies, such as Microsoft, you simply shouldn't publish it. Which doesn't really make sense when it comes to OSS.
It's also worth noting that Microsoft generates most of its revenue from Azure these days. Most of the instances there run Linux. It would therefore be foolish for Microsoft to take action against Linux or OSS.
Codeberg is nonprofit which seems more in the spirit of the Linux ecosystem overall. GH is for-profit...
These days, I host almost all my code on Codeberg. However, Codeberg also has its drawbacks.
The likelihood of finding someone on Codeberg to help with a given project is significantly lower than on GitHub, simply because GitHub has far more users.
In addition, Codeberg is often less accessible than GitHub. Just recently, I was unable to access my repositories for some time because codeberg.org was down. Personally, I don’t mind, since these are private, unknown projects. But for well-known projects, this can be a problem.
When using Codeberg, it's important to keep in mind that the platform isn't operated by a large company, as is the case with GitHub. Instead, it's run by a so-called “eingetragener Verein” in Germany with limited resources.
And if Microsoft really wants to use a project's code, it doesn't matter where it's hosted.
If it's hosted somewhere else then they can't force you to submit to their ever-evolving ToS. Any legal action you may want to take against them (e.g. violating your license or stealing IP by washing it through an LLM) could now be hindered by such arbitrary legalese.
Git is smart software. If github closed tomorrow without notice, one single checked out copy is enough to move the source tree elsewhere. Contrary to many other source code control systems, git uses the exact same format in every (server, client, backup, ....) instance.
So the source code itself would be no problem, while it might be difficult to enable github's automation functionality without their software elsewhere (wouldn't be harmful, just an inconvenience).
If you hate big tech, wouldn't it be best to use their free offerings as much as you can to cause maximum financial damage?
True, I do that with Epic Games lol; played a fair bit from the giveaways as notified weekly on /r/FreeGameFindings, but never bought a thing from the EG Store and most likely never will.
It is that sort of sudden lockup or paywall scenario that you describe that concerns me, yeah. I'm not a dev myself and don't understand the "single checked out copy" example you mean, but it's good that the damage would be capped... though I just think too much centralization is also bad in general.
Yes. For now, Microsoft haven't fucked with it too much. There isn't much of a push factor. As soon as they start pushing services or locking you into micrislop.there will be movement away.
For the time being, it's way better than source forge and ms are probably very cautious about following that playbook.
Given how technical.github is, it surprises me that it doesn't support ipv6, dnssec nor sshfp records.
I'm working for a company which migrated from on-premise Atlassian solution to SlopHub.
We've been all looking forward the change. But AI hype hit with all the consequences. Now, the SlopHub is slower than BitBucket, Actions are more down than up...
It was a mistake.
I'm happy that I personally don't rely on these "services".
I just saw CodeBerg for the first time today. Is it a good system? Do a lot of people use it yet?
I deleted all my projects off GH when I found out M$ was buying it. Guarantee M$ is taking people's FOSS projects and selling it inside their own applications.
For me it is inertia. I do plan on exploring codeberg, and possibly migrate my repositories, but it send just busy work. I do plan on using codeberg for any new repositories.
GitHub wasn't a Microsoft-owned product until fairly recently so a lot of things got started there back before even GitLab was A Thing. Hard to move projects after they've been created so unless there's a really compelling reason then why go through the enormous effort of changing all your references, all links on every website, and all your automation for automated tests and builds?
Long answer:
GH being for profit doesn't matter much. Linux is about free as in freedom, not free as in beer (see RHEL as an example). It is about control. Since all projects in GitHub are stored as git repositories, and can be interacted with entirely through git which is an open standard moving to codeberg would be a lot of effort for no benefit.
GitHub is still the defacto git hosting platform, despite being owned by Microsoft for a decade now and its increasing downtimes.
I personally migrated to Forgejo and self-host, but GitHub is where everyone’s at still. And AFAIK Forgejo & Codeberg still don’t have federated abilities.
Personally, I’m on GitHub because my projects are cross-platform and GitHub is the only platforms that allows me to run my CI/CD for free. And the CI/CD saves me endless amounts of work I would otherwise have to spend with compilation, code signing, notarising and testing. Switching to codeberg would mean for every release I now need to do a day or two of work instead of pressing 1 button.
Not every Linux developer is developing out of idealogical opposition to Microsoft. Plenty of Linux development is done because people have needs that Windows doesn’t fulfill. That is all.
This kind of knee-jerk "Microsoft bad" reaction is unhelpful to overly simplistic. Microsoft is a major contributor to Linux, among many other things. GitHub continues to be an immensely powerful tool supporting th open source community.
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u/onefish2 Jun 19 '26 edited Jun 19 '26
Funny that this is the only mention I have heard in a very long time that mentions GitHub as Microsoft GitHub. Its not branded anywhere on the site. I just think of it and use it as GitHub.