Leaving Github

So, after more than 15 years, I’m sad to say that I finally decided to leave GitHub. I still work on client’s repositories that live there, but as of today I no longer host any of my own projects with the Octocat.

So why did I leave? Well, I guess there’s many reasons.

When Microsoft bought GitHub, I knew there was trouble ahead. At first I was pleasantly surprised. It seemed that maybe Microsoft weren’t so bad after all. But of course it turned out that I was just being terribly naive. Microsoft only ever has their own interests at heart.

This is just another episode that confirms that RMS was right about everything. In this era of AI and centralisation, sovereignty has never been more important.

When I first set up my business, Losource, it was all about open source, free software, freedom and decentralisation. The name itself comes from “Lateral Open Source”. But the idea wasn’t just to publish open source software. The idea was that I could empower my clients by building them working solutions using existing open source software rather than attempting to lock them into using me forever by building undocumented and proprietary custom software. This was the standard agency playbook at the time and I always hated it.

For a while it seemed that things were getting better. It seemed that maybe Microsoft and the other large American tech companies would start to use open source, invest in it and that things would generally improve. Of course the reality is things are just as bad as they’ve always been. In some cases they’re getting a lot worse. Governments are becoming increasingly censorious. Data has become the lingua franca of the AI age. We are all now quite familiar with the idea that if the service is free, it is us who are the product.

In a strange way, all of these things have only served to validate the warnings of a certain Richard M. Stallman. I know he may not be the most popular person in the world, but we have to give him his due. He was right about a lot of things.

Happily, thanks to people who believe in sovereignty, all is not lost. I’m happy to report that I have found the perfect drop-in replacement for GitHub and it’s called Forgejo.

I’ve installed the latest version, version 15. It’s absolutely amazing in that it perfectly replicates most of the features and functionality of GitHub into a system that I can host myself. When combined with Tailscale it gives me a sovereign, secure and flexible alternative and I don’t know why I didn’t use it before.

This latest version even features support for GitHub compatible actions which are called Runners. I’ve just installed my own runner and got it to build my static sites and deploy them to Cloudflare using the Wrangler CLI tool.

As people become increasingly wary of Big Tech and their agendas, I think sovereignty is going to become increasingly important. Thanks to the efforts of people like the Free Software Foundation and others, we do actually have the building blocks to build ourselves a sovereign future.

I intend to reclaim the original vision of Losource and I intend to help others, whether they’re businesses or individuals, to wean themselves off the corporate cloud and onto their own sovereign systems.

The reason that data is so valuable these days is that companies need it to train AIs. I believe that in our immediate future, local AI is going to become viable and for it to really work, people are going to have to retain and protect their own data so they can train the AI themselves.

More than that, my initial experiments with local memory and sovereign local AI trained on my own data has been nothing short of magical. It’s one thing talking to a large language model that’s just been trained on the internet, it’s quite another to talk to one that’s been trained on your own information and knowledge.

For both sanity and security, the only way forward is sovereignty.