WHY I DITCHED
GITHUB
And migrated to a community-based alternative.
THE CONTROVERSIES
ICE Collaboration
GitHub renewed contracts with ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) despite significant employee protests and resignations. They chose profit over ethics.
Copilot & Consent
GitHub Copilot was trained on code from billions of lines of publicly available repositories hosted on GitHub, including projects under open-source licenses, without developers having opted in to this use. Critics and a class-action lawsuit argue that Copilot can reproduce code originally governed by licenses like GPL, MIT, and Apache without clear attribution or compliance with those license terms
Capitol riot comments related employee firing
GitHub fired one of its employees after he warned colleagues to stay safe following the January 6 United States Capitol attack. This showed GitHub was too quick to police an employee’s private expression of concern about political violence.
The New TOS
GitHub’s Terms of Service hand the company sweeping rights to use public code to train commercial AI models, all while claiming private repositories are safe, though the vague language and lack of transparency leave developers with no real control over how their work is used. It’s a power grab disguised as a legal formality: your code fuels a paid product, and you don’t get a say
THE ALTERNATIVE
Codeberg.org
Community-Based
Owned by the members, not a corporation. Decisions are made democratically, ensuring the platform serves its users, not shareholders.
Non-Profit
No investors to please. No need to monetize your data or sell out to AI companies to meet quarterly targets.
Gitea-based
Built on Gitea, providing a familiar, lightweight, and fast interface. It's open source software hosting open source code.
No AI Scraping
Your code belongs to you. Codeberg respects your license and privacy, and doesn't use your work to train proprietary AI models.