Video download link | md5sum 5a3cb71ec214a973713d91f1d5b50228 GitHub Closing Shop Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0



Summary: GitHub isn't free-as-in-freedom (it's proprietary) and it was never 'for free'; many people are failing to see -- at their own peril -- that GitHub has no business model and thus it will never be 'for free' (Microsoft is realising the losses are becoming too much of a yoke already)

THE company GitHub was never profitable. It just gave Git hosting 'for free' with a Web interface to manage and navigate repositories. GitHub itself is proprietary and for many years it managed to attract many users, offering 'for free' all sorts of things, including computational resources. But how did GitHub plan to make money, even just to cover salaries?

Blender, taking note of GitHub just riding shareholders' money, avoided the GitHub trap and explained why. Microsoft, desperate to take control over Free software somehow, decided to take this thing which operated at a loss. It was never going to work because efforts to make it profitable would result in an exodus greater than what happened in the wake of ICE scandals.

In the GitHub series (Part 28 in particular) we've taken note of serious trouble. The latest is office closures. This is permanent. What comes next? Our guess is that Microsoft will try to increase fees; it already does this with Teams and no doubt Azure will continue to raise the prices, which still isn't going to be enough (hence layoffs in Azure for 3 years already).

People who still use GitHub because they think it's cheap or "for free" need to learn a lesson from Gitlab.com. Hosting is never free. There's this new post in Gemini that says: "In honor of World Give Up GitHub day, here’s a quick guide to how to serve up your own git repos."

It's not as hard as it may seem. People need not even be programmers to do this. Relying on Microsoft or outsourcing to Microsoft is a foolish move. ⬆