Well, one day MS could shut everything down or charge a lot of money to continue using the services. Almost all open source projects are currently hosted on Github (and rely on their services).
Yes, the code is replicated on thousands of machines around the web, but this concentration of control by a single company is extremely dangerous in my opinion.
The way events are unfolding these days, I'm really worried about what could happen.
Take for example Starlink and Ukraine... The USA threatened to shut down the internet service if Ukraine won't sign the rare minerals deal. A deal that would make Ukraine a colony of USA.
The contexts aren't the same. You aren't a captive audience with GitHub, and the "concentration of control by a single company" makes it sound like they forced us to use their service. We chose to gather there because of critical mass, similar to ig, FB, etc.
Starlink is a legitimate concern because in some places there were no other choice, hence a captive audience.
Sure, but the strategy of US companies has been the same for many years.
Take for example Gmail: I remember 10 years ago it was free even for companies up to 100 users, then 50, then 10, then 0... The same with Google Maps, before it was free and later, after reaching a large user base, they changed the terms and above a certain number of visits per month it is a paid service.
Nothing wrong with that of course, but once you are inside their services, they make it really difficult to change providers. It is possible, of course, but in some cases it requires a relevant effort and many prefer to pay after being lured with very different promises.
I recently read the story of how Google took over Yahoo! as a search engine, they used a "Troy horse" ... and when Yahoo! discovered what happened it was too late.
Back to Github and MS ... MS has a very long history of trying to boycott Linux in any way possible (and I also remember what they did to BeOS) ... I think these are very valid reasons not to trust them. They didn't buy GitHub because they're nice and want to help open source ... the first thing they did was kill the Atom IDE. VS is full of trackers,yes it is open source, but also a mean to steal data and information directly from the computer of the developer.
The main problem for me here is the lack of principles, values. The only principle they follow is to try to become overly rich in some way. The US companies have a long history of trying in every legal and almost legal way to avoid paying taxes.
Until a few years ago, Amazon was always in loss in Italy because they transferred the profits (as inflated costs) to their subsidiary in Ireland and the Italian taxpayers gave back every year millions of Euros to Amazon as tax credits.
This is not capitalism ...
Yes, the code is replicated on thousands of machines around the web, but this concentration of control by a single company is extremely dangerous in my opinion.
The way events are unfolding these days, I'm really worried about what could happen.
Take for example Starlink and Ukraine... The USA threatened to shut down the internet service if Ukraine won't sign the rare minerals deal. A deal that would make Ukraine a colony of USA.