Microsoft Bought GitHub and You Ran Away...Have You Gone Back?

It's been just over a year since it was announced that GitHub was being purchased by Microsoft. When the announcement came, a lot of people (including myself) chose to flee GitHub in search of code hosting soil untainted by the Windows owning behemoth. And now that all that time has passed, I'm wondering this: How many people have followed through with their exodus and stuck to it and how many have returned to GitHub in the end? And for those who have returned to GitHub, why did you go back?

While I have still have some repositores still on GitHub, I don't actively maintain any code their anymore. But I'm finding myself wondering if I should go back for a couple of reasons, the main one being that GitHub is so widely used, I worry that it could deter people from contributing to, or even using, the open source projects that I publish.

I'd really love to know what others in the community are experiencing and how this process has gone for them. Please comment and answer the bolded questions above. If you're one who still hasn't gone back to GitHub, please feel free to explain why you haven't looked back.

Comments

[Brandon Sarà]

I moved my repos to GitLab after the announcement. GitLab is actually a really awesome product. It's CI/CD capabilities are top notch, super convenient, and really easy to use. The platform as a whole has so much more to offer out of the box than GitHub, and you get free unlimited private repositores to boot! However, I have considered going back to GitHub lately for two reasons:

1. GitHub is still the king of open source hosting and I fear that my projects won't be very useful to people if they aren't hosted on GitHub.
2. GitHub pages allows one to have a custom domain on a user pages project, and all of one's project GitHub pages will be automatically available via that custom domain.

[Brandon Sarà]

Yes, it does, and I use it for quite a few projects...but the specific feature I mentioned does not. :(

[Ben Sinclair]

I don't have much on GitHub. I am likely to use it less now than I was before, but I didn't really see the appeal before - I'm not quire sure how it became the de facto instead of anyone else's and I've always been annoyed with how many people confuse it with "git" or use it as if it were official in some way (like plugins or package management that take the format "user/repo-name" and assume it's on github).

I will never trust Microsoft. They could spend the next 20 years doing nothing but good deeds and I'd still be wary of them. That doesn't mean I won't use their stuff when I want to, but I try not to encourage others to.

[Brandon Sarà]

True, but I guess that I'm hoping that GitLab just adds the feature right now. Perhaps one day I'll get the motivation to try and whip something up.