GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

Like Gitlab? I assumed Gitlab would dominate after the MS purchase of Github, but I was incorrect that people wouldn't want to trust their data and personal projects to the epic abusers of privacy that is Microsoft.

I am best placed to determine what tools I work with best to get work done. You wouldn't get an electrician in to do some work and then decide you can suddenly prescribe the tools they use.

I just don't have the patience for this sort of nonsense, there are a dozen clients who won't micromanage the operating system, editor and way of working that I'll be using to get the job done. With that said, obviously it's a two-way street and some willingness to be flexible needs to be shown on both sides. If $client wants me to sync my work with their $uniqueVersionControlSystem then fine, I'm willing to put in the extra effort to try and meet their specific needs within reason. But that doesn't extend to working inside a client-provided VM, using a client-prescribed OS image, using a client-specified IDE or making other such major changes to my established ways of doing business.

And in fact any client trying to micromanage this sort of stuff is a massive IR35 working practices red flag over here in the UK. You're better off terminating the agreement and signing something else as a SoftEng contractor.

Well, for starters, there is GitLab which attempts to do a lot of what GitHub does, while allowing you to self host it: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab

In some respects, i'd say that it does things better, for example, GitLab CI seems way easier to use in comparison to GitHub Actions: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/

As far as alternative source code management platforms go, with some code review and issue management functionality added on top, there is also Gogs, which is a far more lightweight solution and better fits smaller deployments: https://github.com/gogs/gogs

It was also forked by the Gitea project, which is largely compatible with it but is also in active development: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea

Oh and there's also GitBucket which also attempts something similar to these: https://github.com/gitbucket/gitbucket

Now, you can probably hook those up with Jenkins or most other CI solutions, but personally i rather enjoyed how Gogs/Gitea integrated with Drone, which allowed for container based builds (no more plugin hell like in Jenkins): https://github.com/drone/drone

Then, you can throw in some additional tools, for example, for code analysis you could use SonarQube ( https://github.com/SonarSource ) and for security scanning of infrastructure you could look at OpenVAS ( https://github.com/greenbone ).

Oh, and on the organizational side something like Rocket.Chat ( https://github.com/RocketChat ) or Mattermost ( https://github.com/mattermost ) for communication and perhaps OpenProject ( https://github.com/opf/openproject ) for project management.

And there you have it! An open source based workflow that allows you to do most of the stuff that GitHub would let you! Of course, concessions might need to be made depending on what your definition of "open" is and whether you're okay with certain features being restricted to paid tiers in some software; if you do have a problem with that, there's also the possibility of looking at some libre alternatives, though that might lead to the occasional half-dead piece of software that doesn't really have financial incentives for maintenance anymore on anyone's part.

That said, i believe that few choose this approach, because it's somewhat complicated to run all of that and all of the sudden you become responsible for your own SLAs, which many don't want. It's often the same reason why people just provision VPSes from AWS, instead of running their own servers in a server room. I think the amount of links to GitHub for open source above speaks volumes about the state of the industry.

I don't think that there's an easy answer to the implications of this, maybe people should just familiarize themselves with the concept of "Service as a Software Substitute", so that they're at least aware of the trade-offs that their choices have: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...