But the outages have been getting worse and worse even before anything related to AI took off.
The issue is that they're not a scrappy startup anymore, they are defacto running the internets development infrastructure and are owned by a trillion dollar company.
So the bar they're measured by has changed and they haven't even tried to keep up, paying lip service to reliability when you are critical infrastructure is not going to go well.
There were reliability issues in 2010 for sure, but it feels worse now; the period before acquisition was the most stable (2014-2017).
vvillena · 2026-04-28 20:16:33 UTC
Their own greed is causing their issues. They could be doing a million different things to reduce demand, but they don't want to dampen their current growth and have opted to continue scaling up at the cost of quality.
omosubi · 2026-04-28 20:53:21 UTC
What would you suggest they do to reduce demand? (This is a serious question btw)
plorkyeran · 2026-04-28 20:40:09 UTC
Github is claiming that a usage spike in 2026 is the cause of availability issues in 2025, so their explanation is clearly incomplete at best. The usage spike may be why things have failed to get better despite them putting effort into improving things, but it isn't the root cause of problems.
UltraSane · 2026-04-28 21:26:51 UTC
If demand increased that much they should be imposing rate limits.
dgb23 · 2026-04-28 20:12:35 UTC
I glanced at zhe thread you linked. And as I understand they are in the process of migrating, which will take more than a year still.
If that’s the case, then it’s not necessarily a problem with Azure itself.
Nemo_bis · 2026-04-28 20:38:09 UTC
Azure also regularly has incidents due to capacity issues in several regions, so that many Azure-managed services also go down. Some of those incidents have been open continuously for many months now.
btown · 2026-04-28 21:07:40 UTC
Coupled with this (unsubstantiated but thorough) discussion on the internals of Azure, if even a fraction of this below-linked post is true, Github's abnormally-filesystem-intensive workflows would have wildly unpredictable performance and reliability forced onto Azure.
Not necessarily culture, it could be just forcing to migrate to azure that is not reliable, no?
cyberpunk · 2026-04-28 21:27:17 UTC
I mean I know we all love to shit on azure, but I don't think it's partially unavailable for 3 hours a day on avg over the last 3 months?
mnau · 2026-04-28 21:45:36 UTC
Azure is not the best, but it mostly works. GitHub gets only 98% reliability for git operation component, reading and committing. This is the most basic component. The fact they are not on this 24/7 and it isn't fixed is the result of a culture (=what is prioritized, what quality is accepted).
alexxxxxxxxxx · 2026-04-28 19:55:41 UTC
I would say uptime and UX/UI:
uptime:
Incomplete pull request results in repositoriesSubscribe
Update - We are actively reindexing the remaining ElasticSearch indexes. Our priority is ensuring correctness and avoiding further impact. We are taking a measured approach to safely backfill data and will share additional updates as progress continues.
Apr 28, 2026 - 15:58 UTC
Update - After yesterday’s incident, we are investigating cases where /pulls and /repo/pulls pages are not showing all indexed pull requests. This is because our Elasticsearch cluster does not currently contain all indexed documents.
No pull request data has been lost. As pull requests are updated, they will be reindexed. We are also working on accelerating a full reindex so these pages return complete results again.
Apr 28, 2026 - 14:51 UTC
Investigating - We are investigating reports of degraded performance for Pull Requests
Apr 28, 2026 - 14:17 UTC
maxvisser · 2026-04-28 19:55:44 UTC
Nah they must be actively moving infrastructure (to azure?) for the amount of outages they have
We don't have a labeled y-axis so their record usage could be a 5% increase for all they're showing us.
weiliddat · 2026-04-28 20:30:31 UTC
I think it doesn't need to be a large X% increase, just needs to hit some critical infra threshold where various services start failing and cascade. Weakest link and everything.
arianvanp · 2026-04-28 20:32:46 UTC
And yet GitHub has felt the most dead it ever did. Less quality contributions. Less feeling of community. All the open source projects are struggling.
They dont have a service usage problem they have a slop problem. Ban the slop and the platform will thrive
tfrancisl · 2026-04-28 19:56:00 UTC
#2 makes #1 a big problem. AI-generated code is fine if you have thorough engineering practices around it. Are they blindly merging in AI generated code without review? Maybe. Thats an issue of engineering practices, not of the use of generative AI in general.
saghm · 2026-04-28 20:58:25 UTC
Yeah, this is what I was going to say. These two theories are not mutually exclusive, and there's an argument that they're casually related
campbel · 2026-04-28 19:58:35 UTC
It's been on a downward trend before agentic coding took over. I suspect it's a mix of Microsoft culture and Microsoft infrastructure. It's starting to feel about the same quality as other Microsoft services.
Short aside, I have to rehost dotnet CLI binaries because their hosting infrastructure is so unreliable that it was causing CI failures regularly.
dijit · 2026-04-28 20:00:27 UTC
I suppose there's a reason that most Microsoft development shops tend to vendor their dependencies as a culture.
Gamedev being the most prominent that I have personally witnessed.
EDIT: Why are you booing me, I'm right.
bayindirh · 2026-04-28 20:01:06 UTC
Note: I'm a graybeard coming from SVN era.
GitHub took a massive hit in credibility when it got bought by Microsoft. We are a burned generation, we have seen the worst of Microsoft. This created a massive crack in the foundation of trust for most people.
Then Copilot happened. Some people dug how the training is done, and one GitHub employee responded by mail that every public repository including GPL repositories are included (the relevant Tweets are deleted unfortunately). The created crack has deepened. Some of us (incl. me) left GitHub.
As Copilot entrenched, Microsoft's product development practices and philosophy took over, and vibe coding started to be used by hordes of developers, GitHub's code foundations started to crumble. Add the big migrations they're doing & regressions they are causing on the UI now, and we're here.
GitHub's first enshittification cycle is over. Now we're starting the second cycle. The bloated, slow, entrenched hegemon's decay from relevance phase.
It'll be a slow decay. It won't fall in a day, but they golden era is long gone.
spindump8930 · 2026-04-28 20:06:36 UTC
Any more context on the copilot training note? More pointers would be very interesting, but we'd need to keep in mind how many different underlying models were (are?) branded as copilot. I thought at some points the "copilot" model in autocomplete contexts was a finetuned GPT from OAI.
Re: GPL, there are other open access datasets of git repos that make some distinctions between copyleft licenses but those are older resources now.
bayindirh · 2026-04-28 20:23:16 UTC
Please see below. This is from the OG, "first generation" Copilot, from 2022. If I can find any more from my dusty trove, I'll edit or reply to this very comment. I can't do more digging now, because I'm in a pinch.
> Re: GPL, there are other open access datasets of git repos that make some distinctions between copyleft licenses but those are older resources now.
Arguably "The Stack" contains only permissively licensed code, but there are two repositories of mine inside it. One is a very simple logging library, without any license (which implies "All Rights Reserved"), and another is a fork of LightDM which I worked on, which is GPL licensed.
So any "permissively licensed" dataset probably contains at least one copylefted or strong copyrighted codebase, making them highly suspicious.
== EDIT ==
Found some. Kagi's date-constrained search to the rescue.
It began pretty much immediately after the acquisition. There was an uptime chart making the rounds a while back, and less than a year in, the all green data points of pre-Microsoft Github turned to lots of red. I assume brain drain, as everyone vested or otherwise completed their contractual requirements and cashed out. And, Microsoft has never had a great reliability culture in their cloud services, so no in-house talent to effectively take over.
fridder · 2026-04-28 19:55:15 UTC
It really has been infuriating lately. Between this and my company's proxy screwing with HTTP/2 at least once a day the frustration is very very real. While I'm nowhere as invested in GitHub its decline does make me sad.
tedivm · 2026-04-28 19:55:30 UTC
It really has been remarkable watching GitHub just crumble as an organization. There's a lot of discussion about why: the switch from being independent to being part of Microsoft, having resources pushed to Copilot instead of core service, the organization structure itself, a reliance on vibe coding, etc etc.
Regardless of the reason, it's undeniable that GitHub is facing some serious issues. The unofficial status page[1] tells a horrifying story.
I would absolutely love to get some insider perspective on this (if only to learn how to prevent it from happening anywhere I work), but I think it's clear to anyone who has been paying any attention that GitHub is a sinking ship and the only reason people haven't abandoned it already is inertia. Considering how much else is changing in software right now I don't think inertia is enough to sustain a company.
Some years ago I wondered how long will it take them to go they way sourceforge went. Once you grow too much without a proper leader, you will fall :(.
pathartl · 2026-04-28 20:25:22 UTC
Comparing GitHub and SourceForge as if they were cut from the same cloth is laughable to me. SF has always been a wretched hive of ads and dark patterns.
SwellJoe · 2026-04-28 20:56:31 UTC
Not always, but it was so long ago that it became that, younger folks could be forgiven for thinking so.
pathartl · 2026-04-28 22:11:06 UTC
Idk, I'm in my mid 30's and I've never had a moment where I've been glad to see something on SourceForge.
SwellJoe · 2026-04-28 22:24:13 UTC
So you were ~10 years old. I'll assume not a heavy user of Open Source software, at that time.
Given SourceForge only hosted Open Source software, and had no source of revenue beyond ads and sponsors for quite a long time, AFAIR, I think they get a pass on a banner ad.
xstas1 · 2026-04-28 22:18:12 UTC
I do remember early SourceForge. It remember it as very clean, simple and reliable, and popular.
Steeeve · 2026-04-28 22:38:03 UTC
Not popular. Core. It was the trusted place for open source software. Then it was ads. Then the day they bundled there was a MASS exodus. And the 14 people who ran their own source code interfaces scoffed and said "see. I told you." And we all said "yup" - we knew something would happen one day, but that was a worst-case-scenario that few thought was even a remote possibility.
kivle · 2026-04-28 20:36:18 UTC
Sourceforge died in a very different way though. Bundling spyware/crapware in install packages for open source software was a serious breach of trust, and was pretty much the direct reason for mass migration to Github. Github is failing on the technical side, but they at least mostly have their brand value intact. I think it will still take quite a lot for a mass migration of the same scale to happen.
janalsncm · 2026-04-28 22:37:25 UTC
Mostly, but they were injecting ads into PRs if I recall.
unclejuan · 2026-04-28 20:12:57 UTC
> The unofficial status page[1] tells a horrifying story.
If it weren't bad enough, github often has issues when the unofficial status page doesn't report them, so the actual number is even worse.
fabiensanglard · 2026-04-28 20:18:14 UTC
Wow. According to the current metric (87.25% uptime), github suffers a partial outage 3h/day.
In their defense, they dramatically "over"-report sev-2/3's (things like, avatar urls are not loading in saudi arabia), which makes their cumulative uptime look much worse than it is.
If you filter for major/critical outages, their uptime of core services in trailing 12 months all have two 9's.
Also, a huge part of their cumulatively-bad availability story is copilot, which is a functionality (LLM inference) that most organizations have struggled to get two 9's of availability in for the last 9 months.
_doctor_love · 2026-04-28 20:36:37 UTC
> insider perspective on this
I do not work at MSFT but I don't feel that I need insider perspective to understand what's going on. GitHub is being managed the way other services get managed once they're bought by big companies. Initially fine, then starts to decline, then eventually craters. Everything becomes the numbers game.
Microsoft, Oracle, VMware, CA (where software goes to die), Salesforce, the list goes on. Every once in a great while there's a good M&A team that doesn't fuck it up but that's sadly rare.
superxpro12 · 2026-04-28 20:37:27 UTC
Hey, you leave Creative Assembly out of this!
thinkingtoilet · 2026-04-28 20:51:05 UTC
This is a general observation, no hard data, but I find there seems to be a wall at 2 years after an acquisition. By 2 years a lot of the best talent leave the company entirely or go somewhere else in the company. Things can cruise along just fine for a bit, but as the institutional knowledge slowly leaves it gets worse and worse. Couple that with the bureaucracy and insanity of a global mega-corporation, the quality fades slowly at first, then it picks up.
_doctor_love · 2026-04-28 21:10:01 UTC
> I find there seems to be a wall at 2 years after an acquisition.
It's called a vesting schedule. ;)
What I've seen is that usually the founders and heavy hitters from the original company are very BS-averse and basically just stay around to collect their money and then jet for a situation that doesn't suck.
For the rest of the gang, it tends to bifurcate: some folks stay at the big company indefinitely after the acquisition because while they can see the suck, nowhere else pays as well or is as cushy (I know people who have been thinking about leaving for 12 years). Still others excel at big company work and make a happy career out of it for a while but don't stay forever.
znpy · 2026-04-28 21:37:24 UTC
> but as the institutional knowledge slowly leaves
I’d like to offer a different perspective: the “institutional knowledge” often (but not always, of course) are the old timers that have been gatekeeping knowledge in order to make themselves irreplaceable.
I’ve seen this a couple of times, even in faang-sized companies.
I’m not sure this is the case of GitHub though.
It might be due to lower quality code spit out by some llm, reviewed by some llm and shipped to production by some llm-generated pipeline.
Also, wasn’t github pushed to move to azure?
Anyways, it surely is a strong signal of engineering culture degrading.
bsimpson · 2026-04-28 21:11:11 UTC
I feel like MS went out of its way to make a point that GitHub and NPM would be independent orgs that no longer had to worry about making keep-the-lights-on money. It was positioned as a benevolent acquisition for the good of the development community.
As so often happens, that didn't last long.
Nest was originally independent. Didn't take long for it to merge with the Google Home brand.
I'm sure there are countless other examples.
_doctor_love · 2026-04-28 21:30:13 UTC
> would be independent orgs that no longer had to worry about making keep-the-lights-on money
It is honestly so shameful that we keep falling for this gambit. It is nothing more than a rank "but this time is different!"
Economics is what drives things. It is what drives things in households and it is what drives things in companies.
Unless times are truly great or the company is truly forward-looking, promises of freedom and independence from the business cycle is just an empty promise of creating a research lab.
layer8 · 2026-04-28 21:55:29 UTC
I remember discussions at the time where people predicted that this would certainly happen. If people “keep falling” for it, it’s not the same people. And Microsoft certainly wasn’t (and isn’t) a company you’d trust for such statements.
bsimpson · 2026-04-28 22:02:54 UTC
Satya got his own line of "maybe Microsoft's not evil anymore" press cycles out of it.
jbxntuehineoh · 2026-04-28 20:42:52 UTC
literally zero nines of uptime lmao, do they win an award?
tedivm · 2026-04-28 21:17:03 UTC
Even if you go service by service you're talking about critical things like `git` operations (literally what they're named for) at a single nine, and stuff that's pretty basic like static web hosting as only two nines. They literally can't even keep static webpages up.
Hm. I read that as saying that their users are writing more code with the assistance of LLMs, thus placing more stress on their systems. I do not read it as making any comment about their own practices.
rgbrgb · 2026-04-28 19:55:34 UTC
>I’ll share more details about where the Ghostty project will be moving to in the coming months. We have a plan but I'm also very much still in discussions with multiple providers (both commercial and FOSS).
what a cliff hanger!
As someone with similar warm feelings for GitHub, it's kind of sad to see the fragmentation but I have similar frustrations with the recent outages. Perhaps it's time to explore the idea of unbundling the social/discovery layer from the code hosting/dev tool so we can live between the myriad git/jj hosts but still do "social coding" together.
tommica · 2026-04-28 19:55:52 UTC
Maybe you could start a new github - create the job you always wanted!
preommr · 2026-04-28 19:55:57 UTC
> past month I’ve kept a journal where I put an “X” next to every date where a GitHub outage has negatively impacted my ability to work2. Almost every day has an X
Is it really this bad?
I've seen people complain about Github, but I thought it was more of a theoretical inconvenience rather than a real practical one. As in, the uptime for a serious software company should be 99.9, but two hours down just today, and constant outages over the month that they noticed... that seems way worse.
Yeah, we use GH heavily at work (not so much GHA for critical workflows, thank god). They have an outage that breaks our git operations once a week at least. Like, webhooks not delivered, PRs not showing up, git operations not working, API issues… and that’s not counting GitHub actions which we only use for noncritical workflows
varun_ch · 2026-04-28 19:56:20 UTC
I don’t know if it’s production ready yet, but tangled.org is a really interesting take on a forge and I’ve been watching it for a while. It decentralizes the centralized parts of GitHub in a pretty neat way. The biggest problem with forges that aren’t GitHub is people need to make and manage all these different accounts for each place they contribute (which almost certainly will lower the amount of people who do. Maybe this is a good thing these days though...)
Tangled uses the identity stuff from atproto which lets the important stuff (git, CI, etc) be decentralized while people only need one identity to contribute (and you can self host your PDS too). So nothing ends up being reliant on a third party.
charcircuit · 2026-04-28 20:42:15 UTC
But a tangled account doesn't solve the problem of needing an account on those other forges. You just added one more account someone needs to make.
nerdypepper · 2026-04-28 21:22:17 UTC
maybe, but tangled knots actually federate. you could contribute to repos on knot.ghostty.org and knot.tangled.org with the same account. no other platform permits one identity across instances.
vvill · 2026-04-28 20:52:57 UTC
I'm also closely following Tangled's development. Their two biggest weak points: lack of private repositories and ux design (which I don't have a problem with but I've seen many people mention) are both being worked on. Atproto is developing a permissioned data segment to the protocol, and Tangled just hired a designer. I'm excited for it.
xswhiskey · 2026-04-28 19:56:23 UTC
Possibly in a few years from now we'll get actual data about how many outages we've seen or how much have x services degraded, overlapped with the push for "AI everywhere".
josefritzishere · 2026-04-28 19:56:33 UTC
I'm sensing a trend
atonse · 2026-04-28 19:56:48 UTC
During one of the x threads where Mitchell was (legitimately) complaining about Github, there were a couple replies suggesting that GitHub should hire him to be their CEO.
And I remember seeing that and thinking "huh... not at all a bad idea."
There is a specific kind of leader that can turn such ships around, and they are strong in their convictions, and aren't just "managers", but visionaries coupled with strong execution and power to attract talent.
I think a new GitHub will emerge and when it's just right, will grow like wildfire (like OpenClaw, or even GitHub itself did during the SVN and SourceForge era). And many are already trying to be that new GitHub.
MarsIronPI · 2026-04-28 20:10:27 UTC
> I think a new GitHub will emerge and when it's just right, will grow like wildfire (like OpenClaw, or even GitHub itself did during the SVN and SourceForge era). And many are already trying to be that new GitHub.
Really? I can only think of two: Codeberg and Sourceforge. Which are both great, but that's not what I'd call "many".
Cthulhu_ · 2026-04-28 20:27:23 UTC
Gitlab, Bitbucket, Gitea
NewJazz · 2026-04-28 20:27:25 UTC
Gitlab? Three distinct codebases is quite a lot to be honest. Especially when Forgejo has the lineage of Gitea and Gogs in its wake.
saghm · 2026-04-28 20:56:50 UTC
At least as far as I can tell, Gitlab seems to be used a lot more than the other two. I don't think I've ever gone to a page for a SourceForge project that was created after maybe 2012 or so, and although it's possible I've looked at a project on Codeberg or Forgejo, I can't think of a single one off the top of my head. Meanwhile, I've run into projects on Gitlab (either gitlab.com itself or a self-hosted version) at multiple employers and various Linux codebases and packages (Plasma and Gnome desktop environments and other various windowing-related software, Arch Linux package sources, etc.).
I guess it's possible that my experience is wildly different than others, but if we're talking about volume of usage today rather than individual preferences, it's kind of shocking for me that someone wouldn't think to reference Gitlab at all in the list of potential successors, let alone not mention it literally first.
foresto · 2026-04-28 22:09:15 UTC
Gitlab's interface makes me want to cry every time I have to use it. I would not recommend it to someone who misses classic GitHub. Codeberg/Forgejo/Gitea would be a much better match.
palata · 2026-04-28 20:45:24 UTC
Sourceforge???
NewJazz · 2026-04-28 20:53:40 UTC
I am pretty sure they were talking about sourcehut...
estimator7292 · 2026-04-28 20:13:28 UTC
I'm still holding out hope for distributed and federated git forges. The only compelling reason for everyone to centralize on GitHub is collaboration on issues/PRs without everyone allowing signups on their self-hosted forges. That could be achieved without hosting every line of code everyone's ever written in the same crumbling infrastructure.
It'll probably never happen. But it'd be really nice if it did.
jauntywundrkind · 2026-04-28 20:45:20 UTC
Jeremie (of XMPP) has a neat project, v-it, which uses atproto (Bluesky) to let people socialize their changes to projects. https://v-it.org/
It's a bit short of actual PRs, but in some ways, especially with agents, the lo-fi approach has some advantages.
mamcx · 2026-04-28 20:39:51 UTC
The problem is that Github does a lot.
However, I consider that there is still not a great UI for the core service, in special for a complex project.
In the other hand, I bet jujutsu has the best basic take, and is still missing a good forge.
fragmede · 2026-04-28 21:02:18 UTC
Unfortunately, naming things is hard, and JujitsuHub just doesn't roll off the tongue the same way that GitHub does. jjhub? forgesu?
dannyfreeman · 2026-04-28 21:21:52 UTC
jub
kevinrineer · 2026-04-28 21:32:36 UTC
You just don't have to think about it too hard:
jjplace/jjhub/codetown, whatever. Doesn't matter.
Names don't matter that much for brands. Names just have to be simple enough to remember (ideally two syllables or less). What the heck does Nike mean, for example? Boeing is just someone's name. Microsoft is just two words smashed together. A brand's name literally doesn't matter.
AussieWog93 · 2026-04-28 22:14:32 UTC
Case in point: Apple Computers.
shit_game · 2026-04-28 21:35:28 UTC
Dojo is such an obvious thing, but its such an obvious thing that there are dozens of software trying to call themselves that.
Comments
1. Increasing amount of AI-generated code in their codebase, decreasing the quality of the service.
2. Bought by Microsoft, and their bad engineering culture has spread to GitHub.
Perhaps it's a bit of both.
It started being very bad when MS pushed for AI
According to GitHub, Azure migration is the attempt at a fix/upscaling, not the underlying cause of the issues.
Addressing GitHub’s recent availability issues: https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/addressing-gi...
An update on GitHub availability: https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...
The issue is that they're not a scrappy startup anymore, they are defacto running the internets development infrastructure and are owned by a trillion dollar company.
So the bar they're measured by has changed and they haven't even tried to keep up, paying lip service to reliability when you are critical infrastructure is not going to go well.
There were reliability issues in 2010 for sure, but it feels worse now; the period before acquisition was the most stable (2014-2017).
If that’s the case, then it’s not necessarily a problem with Azure itself.
https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242
uptime:
Incomplete pull request results in repositoriesSubscribe Update - We are actively reindexing the remaining ElasticSearch indexes. Our priority is ensuring correctness and avoiding further impact. We are taking a measured approach to safely backfill data and will share additional updates as progress continues. Apr 28, 2026 - 15:58 UTC Update - After yesterday’s incident, we are investigating cases where /pulls and /repo/pulls pages are not showing all indexed pull requests. This is because our Elasticsearch cluster does not currently contain all indexed documents.
No pull request data has been lost. As pull requests are updated, they will be reindexed. We are also working on accelerating a full reindex so these pages return complete results again. Apr 28, 2026 - 14:51 UTC Investigating - We are investigating reports of degraded performance for Pull Requests Apr 28, 2026 - 14:17 UTC
https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...
I suppose it's a bit too on the nose to point out that git is decentralized and itself doesn't really suffer from this, nor need it.
I would not be surprised if Github has to stop offering so many services for free.
I‘ve noticed that some projects have „Claude“ as one of their top three contributors.
They aren't, of course. The Y axis is missing. GitHub didn't have 0 daily commits at the start of 2023.
https://handsondataviz.org/how-to-lie-with-charts.html#exagg...
They dont have a service usage problem they have a slop problem. Ban the slop and the platform will thrive
Short aside, I have to rehost dotnet CLI binaries because their hosting infrastructure is so unreliable that it was causing CI failures regularly.
Gamedev being the most prominent that I have personally witnessed.
EDIT: Why are you booing me, I'm right.
GitHub took a massive hit in credibility when it got bought by Microsoft. We are a burned generation, we have seen the worst of Microsoft. This created a massive crack in the foundation of trust for most people.
Then Copilot happened. Some people dug how the training is done, and one GitHub employee responded by mail that every public repository including GPL repositories are included (the relevant Tweets are deleted unfortunately). The created crack has deepened. Some of us (incl. me) left GitHub.
As Copilot entrenched, Microsoft's product development practices and philosophy took over, and vibe coding started to be used by hordes of developers, GitHub's code foundations started to crumble. Add the big migrations they're doing & regressions they are causing on the UI now, and we're here.
GitHub's first enshittification cycle is over. Now we're starting the second cycle. The bloated, slow, entrenched hegemon's decay from relevance phase.
It'll be a slow decay. It won't fall in a day, but they golden era is long gone.
Re: GPL, there are other open access datasets of git repos that make some distinctions between copyleft licenses but those are older resources now.
> Re: GPL, there are other open access datasets of git repos that make some distinctions between copyleft licenses but those are older resources now.
Arguably "The Stack" contains only permissively licensed code, but there are two repositories of mine inside it. One is a very simple logging library, without any license (which implies "All Rights Reserved"), and another is a fork of LightDM which I worked on, which is GPL licensed.
So any "permissively licensed" dataset probably contains at least one copylefted or strong copyrighted codebase, making them highly suspicious.
== EDIT ==
Found some. Kagi's date-constrained search to the rescue.
1. Should GitHub be sued for training Copilot on GPL code?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31847931
2. GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33226515
3. AI-Powered GitHub Copilot Leaves Preview, Now Costs $100 a Year: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/22/06/25/0334207/ai-po...
4. GitHub Copilot is trained on all languages that appear in public repositories (CTRL+F on the page): https://web.archive.org/web/20260428180443/https://github.co...
Regardless of the reason, it's undeniable that GitHub is facing some serious issues. The unofficial status page[1] tells a horrifying story.
I would absolutely love to get some insider perspective on this (if only to learn how to prevent it from happening anywhere I work), but I think it's clear to anyone who has been paying any attention that GitHub is a sinking ship and the only reason people haven't abandoned it already is inertia. Considering how much else is changing in software right now I don't think inertia is enough to sustain a company.
1. https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/
Edit: 2001, I see one (1) banner ad, and that ad was seemingly for an OSDN (Open Source Developer Network) conference. https://web.archive.org/web/20010517002942/http://sourceforg...
Given SourceForge only hosted Open Source software, and had no source of revenue beyond ads and sponsors for quite a long time, AFAIR, I think they get a pass on a banner ad.
If it weren't bad enough, github often has issues when the unofficial status page doesn't report them, so the actual number is even worse.
https://onlineornot.com/uptime-calculator/87.25
If you filter for major/critical outages, their uptime of core services in trailing 12 months all have two 9's.
https://isgithubcooked.com/?severities=major.critical
Also, a huge part of their cumulatively-bad availability story is copilot, which is a functionality (LLM inference) that most organizations have struggled to get two 9's of availability in for the last 9 months.
I do not work at MSFT but I don't feel that I need insider perspective to understand what's going on. GitHub is being managed the way other services get managed once they're bought by big companies. Initially fine, then starts to decline, then eventually craters. Everything becomes the numbers game.
Microsoft, Oracle, VMware, CA (where software goes to die), Salesforce, the list goes on. Every once in a great while there's a good M&A team that doesn't fuck it up but that's sadly rare.
It's called a vesting schedule. ;)
What I've seen is that usually the founders and heavy hitters from the original company are very BS-averse and basically just stay around to collect their money and then jet for a situation that doesn't suck.
For the rest of the gang, it tends to bifurcate: some folks stay at the big company indefinitely after the acquisition because while they can see the suck, nowhere else pays as well or is as cushy (I know people who have been thinking about leaving for 12 years). Still others excel at big company work and make a happy career out of it for a while but don't stay forever.
I’d like to offer a different perspective: the “institutional knowledge” often (but not always, of course) are the old timers that have been gatekeeping knowledge in order to make themselves irreplaceable.
I’ve seen this a couple of times, even in faang-sized companies.
I’m not sure this is the case of GitHub though.
It might be due to lower quality code spit out by some llm, reviewed by some llm and shipped to production by some llm-generated pipeline.
Also, wasn’t github pushed to move to azure?
Anyways, it surely is a strong signal of engineering culture degrading.
As so often happens, that didn't last long.
Nest was originally independent. Didn't take long for it to merge with the Google Home brand.
I'm sure there are countless other examples.
It is honestly so shameful that we keep falling for this gambit. It is nothing more than a rank "but this time is different!"
Economics is what drives things. It is what drives things in households and it is what drives things in companies.
Unless times are truly great or the company is truly forward-looking, promises of freedom and independence from the business cycle is just an empty promise of creating a research lab.
what a cliff hanger!
As someone with similar warm feelings for GitHub, it's kind of sad to see the fragmentation but I have similar frustrations with the recent outages. Perhaps it's time to explore the idea of unbundling the social/discovery layer from the code hosting/dev tool so we can live between the myriad git/jj hosts but still do "social coding" together.
Is it really this bad?
I've seen people complain about Github, but I thought it was more of a theoretical inconvenience rather than a real practical one. As in, the uptime for a serious software company should be 99.9, but two hours down just today, and constant outages over the month that they noticed... that seems way worse.
https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/
94 incidents in 90 days.
Tangled uses the identity stuff from atproto which lets the important stuff (git, CI, etc) be decentralized while people only need one identity to contribute (and you can self host your PDS too). So nothing ends up being reliant on a third party.
And I remember seeing that and thinking "huh... not at all a bad idea."
There is a specific kind of leader that can turn such ships around, and they are strong in their convictions, and aren't just "managers", but visionaries coupled with strong execution and power to attract talent.
I think a new GitHub will emerge and when it's just right, will grow like wildfire (like OpenClaw, or even GitHub itself did during the SVN and SourceForge era). And many are already trying to be that new GitHub.
Really? I can only think of two: Codeberg and Sourceforge. Which are both great, but that's not what I'd call "many".
I guess it's possible that my experience is wildly different than others, but if we're talking about volume of usage today rather than individual preferences, it's kind of shocking for me that someone wouldn't think to reference Gitlab at all in the list of potential successors, let alone not mention it literally first.
It'll probably never happen. But it'd be really nice if it did.
It's a bit short of actual PRs, but in some ways, especially with agents, the lo-fi approach has some advantages.
However, I consider that there is still not a great UI for the core service, in special for a complex project.
In the other hand, I bet jujutsu has the best basic take, and is still missing a good forge.
jjplace/jjhub/codetown, whatever. Doesn't matter.
Names don't matter that much for brands. Names just have to be simple enough to remember (ideally two syllables or less). What the heck does Nike mean, for example? Boeing is just someone's name. Microsoft is just two words smashed together. A brand's name literally doesn't matter.