If there is already another discussion about this, feel free to add a pointer to this, thank you!
First please see this for explanation:
Since Microsoft owns GitHub, it is clear, that Microsoft also started to use code from repositories there to train their own language models used for “CoPilot” - a product which is sold to paying customers. This started already in 2022 and GitHub is part of the CoreAI team of Microsoft. Recently the CEO Thomas Dohmke also resigned and it is not clear, what will happen in the future. But one thing which is clear: Microsoft does not provide services for free and if you are not a customer, you are the product.
I was also using GitHub for many years and decided to migrate all my existing repositories to Codeberg which is a run by a private association using free software.
I am totally aware, that it would a big task to move from GitHub to another platform or a self-hosted environment using Forgejo and Woodpecker - but I would like to learn if the Nextcloud team is already discussing the potential impact of the changes at GitHub and the general implications of using US based services instead of European services. There are very capable hosting providers in Europe and Germany in particular as well and I am sure it would be possible to achieve more independence from GitHub.
Well, that alone is probably not a strong enough reason to move away. Also, since FOSS code is public by design, you won’t realistically be able to stop AI companies from accessing it anyway.
A better reason would be that you simply want to use European services in general, both to break the oligopoly of the large US tech companies and to reduce dependency on them.
Indeed - that’s the main point here. Getting independent from any big company should be the goal. Maybe self-hosting Forgejo and Woodpecker for CI/CD is a strategy for the future.
On the other hand I also understand problem of getting the community to move as well. It’s not just the repositories, but also issues, forks and pull requests. But on the other hand: you don’t get independence for free.
Personally I will migrate all of my own projects to Codeberg and have my own server to host the Forgejo Runners. So far that worked quite well - also issues, releases and pull requests got migrated completely. I just need to refactor the CI/CD stuff of course, since I can not use existing GitHub actions out of the box. But this is managable since Forgejo Runners work quite similar.
Edit:
Of course you still need a domain registrar and resources for hosting and outgoing e-mail - but this just means mostly server resources. Ideally you have infrastructure as code (Ansible, Terraform) and only need a platform to deploy that, so you are not limited to one single company for specific parts the infrastructure running Forgejo/Woodpecker or similar software.