On Leaving GitHub

When new developers are creating an online presence, they are default pointed to work and publish their code on GitHub. It’s very easy to understand why.

GitHub has by far the largest and most active user community of the repository management services available. For a detailed and relatively recent comparison of the biggest services available, this Medium post from flow.ci does a good job of illustrating how they stack up.

I’ve recently made the decision to migrate all of my code repositories from GitHub to GitLab. Here’s why:

• Security. Specifically security around the Pages feature. GitHub Pages don’t currently support attaching SSL certificates to the sites that they host, while GitLab does.

• Open-Sourceness. GitLab is the only major repository manager that is entirely open source. While I am by no means dogmatic about my support of open source software, I believe that this is a significant point in GitLab’s favor.

• Respectability. GitHub has a lot of ground to make up in terms of its company culture. Julie Ann Horvath’s story of persistent and continued harassment (that caused the company’s founder to resign) in 2014 barely registered with me. I was relatively new to the tech world, and it felt like it was a million miles away.

After their internal investigation of that incident, the company made a public commitment to address what appeared to be fundamental issues with the company’s culture. From the outside, it appeared that GitHub had made strides toward being a more inclusive and less abrasive place to work.

Then on July 5th of this year, Coraline Ehmke told a tale of a GitHub that had not changed. Refusing a generous and likely necessary severance package in order to speak openly about her time there was a brave and necessary act. Her words speak for themselves, but her experience has been the primary motivator for me to utilize a different repo management service for my work.

I will continue to use GitHub to contribute to projects I’m interested in. It’s the industry standard, it would be foolhardy to not have an account there. For my projects and Pages going forward, though, I will use GitLab.