It's not a prison, you can leave whenever you want and take with you everything that's supported outside github. Git clone and go. The features that attracted you to begin with still attract you, though, so maybe you don't want to.
Compared to e.g. moving a team from one mail server to another, moving from github is remarkably simple.
I don't think that's true. GitHub is a frontend for the open git protocol. You can take your repositories and move somewhere else with next to no effort. Heck, almost all of my repositories exist in multiple situations.
All that being said, I've personally been doing more things on a private git server and less things on GitHub.
Remember that github is not just git hosting. While I cannot envision a future in which they'd actively prevent you from export/crawl out your own data, migrating your workflow is not as easy as changing your remote.
I'm on the same boat. For now I don't mind because I use a few other Git hosting services point as a backup while still using GitHub. I'd like to move to another service though, it'll be a conundrum.
I use github for hosting all of my projects right now, but I've been writing my own software in my spare time and I can't wait to migrate, doing everything for yourself brings some really nice advantages.
But unlike many SaaS source-control sites, all your data on github is fairly easily available for bulk download via their APIs... It would of course be annoying to move to a different site, simply because any change in familiar tooling can be annoying, but it's quite doable to automatically migrate everything over.
I think github seems to have been fairly careful toeing the line, and I don't get the sense of being locked in the way I do with some other sites. They appear to be content to compete on the basis of usability and ease of collaboration, not lockin.
Everyone is saying: just work on your local repo. But GitHub is way more than just git. There's bug tracking, code review, continuous integration, etc etc.
Making your organisation too dependent on a remote service can indeed be a scary prospect and I'm not sure what GitHub offers to mitigate this.
Exactly. If it ever becomes necessary to move away from github, it can be done in seconds by adding a new remote and pushing.
I have always seen this as a testament to github's quality - if the switching cost to your users is a couple of shell commands, you better make sure you offer a good product!
I also keep my projects in a local gitosis repository, mainly so I'm not relying on github as part of my deploy flow.
Yeah, I was talking about Git in general, not specifically GitHub. I'm contributing to a few projects that are not on GitHub, and my solution works everywhere, not just on GitHub.
Along the same line of thought: there's a lot of momentum regarding tooling surrounding GitHub. Continuous integration works smoothly. Slack works smoothly. github/hub and ghi let you interact with the issues and repos from the command line. Vim, Emacs, Atom, and Sublime plugins exist to integrate with GitHub. While moving to another hosting platform might fix some things, there is a lot of solid tooling built around GitHub.
Isn't Github a standard closed-source service? I don't see how the article would apply. It's close to the opposite; migration from git host to git host is easy and open-source.
I can move. But it's definitly not painless.
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