Give Up GitHub!

Since June 2022, we have been encouraging and helping FOSS developers to give up on GitHub! We urge all users to finally leave GitHub. Read below on how and why!

We realize this is not an easy task; GitHub is ubiquitous. Through their effective marketing, GitHub has convinced Free and Open Source Software (“FOSS”) developers that GitHub is the best (and even the only) place for FOSS development. However, as a proprietary, trade-secret tool, GitHub itself is the very opposite of FOSS. By contrast, Git was designed specifically to replace a proprietary tool (BitKeeper), and to make FOSS development egalitarian and distributed — using FOSS tools and without a single, centralized site. GitHub has distorted Git — creating add-on features that turn a distributed, egalitarian, and FOSS system into a centralized, proprietary site. And, all those add-on features are controlled by a single, for-profit company — Microsoft. By staying on GitHub, established FOSS communities bring newcomers to this proprietary platform — expanding GitHub's reach. and limiting the imaginations of the next generation of FOSS developers.

In the years since we first launched this campaign, GitHub and Microsoft have gone “all-in” on LLM-gen-AI. GitHub users now complain that it becomes increasingly difficult every month to use GitHub while avoiding GitHub's LLM-gen-AI “anti-features”.

Furthermore, in late June 2026, GitHub began promulgating disinformation regarding the California AI Transparency Act (and amendments proposed in CA SB 1000). This behavior is unconscionable, as GitHub attempts to convince the FOSS community that the California act (which is not perfect but reasonable and well-intentioned) is harmful to FOSS licensing. This escalation of bad behavior simply should not be tolerated by anyone who cares about software freedom.

Nevertheless, know that many rely on GitHub every day. Giving up a ubiquitous, gratis service that has useful (albeit proprietary) features remains perennially difficult. For software developers, giving up GitHub will be even harder than giving up Facebook and Twitter/X! We don't blame anyone who struggles, but hope you will read the reasons and methods below to give up GitHub and join us in seeking better alternatives!

How Do I Give Up GitHub?

The reason that it's difficult to leave GitHub is a side-effect of one of the reasons to leave them: proprietary vendor lock-in. We are aware that GitHub, as the “Facebook of software development”, has succeeded in creating the most enticing walled garden ever made for FOSS developers. Just like leaving Facebook is/was painful because you are/were unsure how you'll find and talk with your friends and family otherwise — leaving GitHub is difficult because it's how you find and collaborate with co-developers. GitHub may even be how you find and showcase your work to prospective employers. We also know that some Computer Science programs even require students to use GitHub.

Accordingly, we call first on the most comfortably-situated developers among you — leaders of key FOSS projects, hiring and engineering managers, and developers who are secure in their employment — to take the first step to reject GitHub's proprietary services. We recognize that for new developers in the field, you'll receive pressure from potential employers (even those that will otherwise employ you to develop FOSS) to participate on GitHub. Collective action requires the privileged developers among us to lead by example; that's why we're not merely asking you leave GitHub, but we're spearheading an effort to help everyone give up GitHub over the long term. You can help protect newcomers from the intrinsic power imbalance created by GitHub by setting the agenda for your FOSS project and hosting your project elsewhere.

As such, we're speaking first to the hiring managers, community leaders, and those in other positions of power that encourage the use of GitHub to new contributors and existing communities. Once someone in power makes the choice to host a project on GitHub, the individual contributors have little choice but to use these proprietary and damaging products. If you are making decisions or have political power within your community and/or employer, we urge you to use your power to center community efforts through FOSS platforms rather than GitHub. If you're an individual contributor who feels powerless to leave GitHub, read our (growing) list of recommendations below on how to take the first steps.

Long term, we've been maintaining this stable URL (that can always be reached by GiveUpGitHub.org) to include links to resources to help everyone — from the most privileged developer to newcomers and members of underrepresented groups in FOSS — to give up on GitHub. If you don't feel that you or your project can yet leave GitHub, we ask that you raise awareness by adding this section to your README.md to share your concerns about GitHub with your users. If you're ready to leave GitHub, you can use this README.md template to replace your current one.

千里之行始於足下
The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Resources to Give Up GitHub

Here are some resources to help you quit GitHub. We'll be expanding this list regularly as we find more resources.

Our primary recommendation at this time for self-hosting is Forgejo, and if you would like a hosted service, we recommend Codeberg (which is built on Forgejo).

Forgejo developers are also focusing much of the current development to make Forgejo's services fully distributed — like the Fediverse and Git itself. We are so excited about this work, and hope you will assist in those efforts if you can.

We also plan to post soon a tutorial on how we set up the Forgejo instances we run at SFC: and git.copyleft.org. We'll include notes in that on how we handled the onslaught of LLM training bots that DDoS'ed our sites!

• Alternative Hosting Services:
  • Codeberg
• Self-Host (or join a group that self-hosts). A few options:
  • Forgejo
  • GitLab Community Edition (note, the GitLab Enterprise Edition, which is provided to the public on gitlab.com, is (like GitHub) trade-secret, proprietary, vendor-lock-in software)

Ways To Help Even Before You Give Up GitHub

First of all, please promote our campaign by sharing the GiveUpGitHub.org URL widely, along with the GiveUpGitHub logo on public platforms like the fediverse / Mastodon — using the hashtag #GiveUpGitHub.

Second, you can also raise the importance of this issue even while you're still using GitHub.

• Add this section to your README.md to share your concerns about GitHub with your users.

• Respectfully and kindly ask, before you contribute to a project on GitHub, if they could provide alternative means to contribute other than using GitHub.

• Explain to your employer the dangers of relying on GitHub's proprietary vendor lock-in products.

Why Give Up GitHub?: The details

There are so many reasons to give up on GitHub, but we list here a few of the most important ones:

• In late June 2026, GitHub began promulgating disinformation regarding the California AI Transparency Act (and amendments proposed in CA SB 1000). This behavior is unconscionable, as GitHub attempts to convince the FOSS community that the California act (which is not perfect but reasonable and well-intentioned) is harmful to FOSS licensing. This escalation of bad behavior simply should not be tolerated by anyone who cares about software freedom.

• Microsoft has escalated the incorporation of its for-profit Copilot product. The Copilot banner now incorporates many different, proprietary, so-called “Artificial Intelligence” (AI) products. However, the first Copilot product was designed to automatically generate code interactively for developers, and that feature is still pushed on GitHub users. Copilot's AI model was trained (according to GitHub's own statements) exclusively with projects that were hosted on GitHub, including many licensed under copyleft licenses. (Microsoft even admits that there was one document that they encountered (and ignored) a whopping 700,000 different times during training — … the GNU General Public License.

  Most of those projects are not in the “public domain”, they are licensed under FOSS licenses. These licenses have requirements including proper author attribution and, in the case of copyleft licenses, they sometimes require that works based on and/or that incorporate the software be licensed under the same copyleft license as the prior work. Microsoft and GitHub have been ignoring these license requirements for more than a year. Their only defense of these actions was a still-unretracted statement by their former CEO, in which he falsely claims that unsettled law on this topic is actually settled. In addition to the legal issues, the ethical implications of GitHub's choice to use copylefted code in the service of creating proprietary software are grave.

  In recent years, the incorporation by Microsoft and its GitHub subsidiary of LLM-gen-AI systems into nearly every aspect of their products — usually not allowing the user to fully opt out — is unconscionable.

• Along with the crescendo of “AI” ballyhoo, Microsoft has rolled out more products that include these technologies into GitHub. Microsoft's Copilot is now generating issues and pull requests and GitHub users cannot opt out. This use is unconscionable and is reason enough alone to Give Up GitHub. Microsoft shamelessly promotes this force-feeding of these dubious technologies to all GitHub users; so much so that Microsoft fully incorporated GitHub to be a mere division of its “CoreAI” division. GitHub users and their work are (sadly) willingly-offered input to that division's work!

• In 2020, the community discovered that GitHub has a for-profit software services contract with the USA Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Activists, including some GitHub employees, have been calling on GitHub for two years to cancel that contract. GitHub's primary reply has been that their parent company, Microsoft, has sold Microsoft Word for years to ICE without any public complaints. They claim that this somehow justifies even more business with an agency whose policies are problematic. Regardless of your views on ICE and its behavior, GitHub's ongoing dismissive and disingenuous responses to the activists who raised this important issue show that GitHub puts its profits above concerns from the community.

• While GitHub pretends to be pro-FOSS (like SourceForge before them), their entire hosting site is, itself, proprietary and/or trade-secret software. We appreciate that GitHub allows some of its employees to sometimes contribute FOSS to upstream projects, but our community has been burned so many times before by companies that claim to support FOSS, while actively convincing the community to rely on their proprietary software. We shouldn't let GitHub burn us in this same way!

• GitHub differs from most of its peers in the FOSS project hosting industry, as GitHub does not even offer any self-hosting FOSS option. Their entire codebase is secret. For example, while we have our complaints about GitLab's business model of parallel “Community” and “Enterprise” editions, at least GitLab's Community Edition provides basic functionality for self-hosting and is 100% FOSS. Meanwhile, there are non-profit FOSS hosting sites such as Codeberg, who develop their platform publicly as FOSS.

• GitHub has long sought to discredit copyleft generally. Their various CEOs have often spoken loudly and negatively about copyleft, including their founder (and former CEO) devoting his OSCON keynote on attacking copyleft and the GPL. This trickled down from the top. We've personally observed various GitHub employees over the years arguing in many venues to convince projects to avoid copyleft; we've even seen a GitHub employee do this in a GitHub bug ticket directly.

• GitHub is now fully part of Microsoft — a company whose executives have historically repeatedly attacked copyleft licensing — ongoing regularly since 2001.

What We Do

• The Corresponding Source
• Copyleft Compliance
• Vizio Lawsuit
• Facing LLM-gen-AI in FOSS
• Past Impact Litigation
• Give Up GitHub!
• Member Projects
• Outreachy
• Use The Source
• FOSSY
• OpenWrt One
• Awards

Vizio Lawsuit

• About the Lawsuit
• Press Release
• Complaint
• Q&A

Resources for Journalists on Vizio

• Press Kit
• Photo Assets
• Glossary

More About Our Copyleft Advocacy

• How To Help
• Strategic GPL Enforcement Initiative
• Impact Litigation for Copyleft
• Liberate IoT Firmware via GPL Enforcement
• Principles of Community-Oriented GPL Enforcement