GitHub decided to suspend my account, without notifying me, let alone telling me which terms of service I did violate. I’ve asked to get the account reinstated a week ago, and have yet to receive a response. As far as I am concerned this is utterly disgraceful behaviour (and possibly in violation of the Digital Services Act (Art. 17, 20)). As it was high time to put my money where my mouth is anyway, I’ve decided to migrate all my open source software repositories to Codeberg. But this still not ideal.
The problem is that I now still rely on an external entity for the distribution of my software. An entity that can again decide to pull the rug from under my feet at any time. Normally, self-hosting from my own domain would solve this, but for inherently collaborative activities like software development this does not work. The attraction of central platform like GitHub is that it allows anyone with an account on it to collaborate on any public repository hosted there. People can follow repositories, suggest edits, report issues, etc. Selfhosting such a platform for your own personal projects does not make much sense, as others that wish to collaborate with you would have to create an account on your instance (and on any other instance with repositories they wish to collaborate with). This is unwieldy for all people concerned. Moreover, to securely selfhost such a platform will take some effort.
Open source software is an essential component in our increasingly digitalised society. As it treats software as a common good, it offers interesting opportunities for making us less dependent on big tech. To enable such a transition we also need a reliable, open, platform to collaborate on the production, maintenance, and distribution of open source software. A community owned platform like Codeberg is definitely a step in the right direction. But its long term sustainability depends on a proper governance structure, professional management and a reliable source of financial support.
Perhaps open source collaboration platforms like Codeberg should be considered a form of public utility, maintaining a public infrastructure, with public financial support, and public oversight. Especially a long term commitment to financially support such initiative is a trivial thing the European Commission could do right now as a first step to becoming digitally sovereign.