As a private person I use it too as a free hoster, but from work I mainly know self hosted instances of jenkins and TeamCity.
When one firm is so dominant for so long, the question is more like “Why shouldn’t we just use GitHub like 80% of software companies do?”
The issues they’ve had are almost all very recent. Very few companies have reevaluated that decision, because moving a big and well-integrated part of infrastructure is a huge project that delivers no value to the business. Speculating that you’ll have fewer development-slowing outages is not the most convincing when asking for the budget to do this. Plus, self-hosted isn’t necessarily going to have better uptime - mistakes happen.
I think before Actions, it would have been a lot easier to migrate off GH though. You’d just need to change a lot of repo URLs and find a way to set up webhooks from the new place to poke CI. Now with Actions, a lot lives in GH and in a proprietary flavor that doesn’t just ‘lift and shift.’
Maybe, but I never heard about any company using github for internal projects in my real life. For me it was always to go to for open source projects.
Then again it's not a topic that often comes up in my developer circles.
It has been bad for at least 18mo, maybe longer? I recall multiple work impacting outages at my previous employer extending back into 2024. Maybe even earlier than that?
Mostly boils down to marketing and easier to establish a community. Almost every developer has an account there, leading to network effects being much larger, so if you're a new FOSS project, finding contributors and getting your project in front of other's eyes is much easier when you're on GitHub compared to your own Forgejo instance.
With that said, I'd question if chasing "most external one-time contributors" or GitHub stars is the right way to actually run a FOSS project, personally I'd avoid thinking about those vanity-numbers as much as possible and focus on the project, code and contributors themselves.
But, I've literally heard those two arguments for "why GitHub" countless of times over the years.
But closed source companies surly don't need to establish a community?
I've tried so many times in the past to argue for self-hosted setup that you fully control if you can afford it, things just get so much smoother and if you're a software development company, you probably want to own the software development workflow E2E so you can actually ship as fast as you want.
I guess, but it's not like you can't learn how to create a pullrequest on bitbucket or how to create an issue on jira as well within a work day?
That seems like the smallest thing when switching to a new company.
> The friction for adopting features like Actions is relatively low.
Yeah, I know almost nothing about the CI integration and actions when it comes to Github. Will look into it. Thank you.
I guess it’s all the other non-git stuff like issue tracking and other (unfortunately) centralized products on GitHub that causes disruption when they go down.
Weird how GitHub built itself around a distributed VC system and then made all its other services centralized.
Yes, you want to run automated builds, unit test, end to end test, UI tests, make it easy for testers to deploy specific versions / tags to internal server. Also kick off builds for iOS on mac computers. We use Teamcity for that.
Tracking of issues, feature and epics. Maybe also knowledge base / wiki. We use Jira.
And pull requests. Bitbucket.
