Luc wrote:One particular allure of Github for Microsoft could be tracking people. They probably already know that you visit github. Now, what projects do you visit? Which ones do you download? Do you develop or maintain any? Do you submit bug reports?
Under GDPR they would commit a criminal offence if we were not explicitly allowing them to do so. Not that I believe that this would deter them from actually do that if they wanted. They can get away with that anyway.
GitLab might not be necessarily better though. One of their biggest investors is
Alphabet Inc. We can expect those guys to be even more hardcore on the data gathering part, and some suspect they might want to purchase GitLab in the future. Nothing official going on, nor leaks. Just some conjecture.
Another example would be Bitbucket, already owned by Atlassian, that is quite active in the data science business I reckon.
So, the solution would be for me to self host? Not practical, sorry. I cannot handle it.
The solution will be something like this:
https://github.com/git-federation/gitpub. My point is practicality before idealism. Sorry, it sounds douchy. I don't care. There is no point to me to become an hermit now, as I am still struggling to find the way to do some useful contributions to projects I care about.
As long as GitHub allows me to contribute to projects I value I will. I am not gonna jump in another random ship which might as well get the same fate in the near future. When a better solution will surface, I will happily migrate.
P.S.
I think companies should be by far more concerned about surveillance. For once, to the best of my knowledge, GitHub did not encrypt private repositories. Businesses all around the world which have private repositories on GitHub might now having MS lurking among those.