this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2025
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M$ is switching to defense and surveillance software. Once they failed to force their crap OS into the phone market, they knew their monopoly days were numbered on the PC. They are hoping to lock in devs on GitHub, but it looks like that might backfire with their overt push for CoPilot use.
How exactly do they hope to lock devs in github??? That's absurd, there's no way they can achieve that. I can always take my projects elsewhere and there's nothing they can do to stop me.
Yea, but will anyone else find it?
They will, if you change the links and share them with at least your users.
If you already have a dedicated following, but the unfortunate truth is people use github for discoverability. People would need to know to look for you if you did the right thing and hosted your project somewhere where you and it won't be exploited
I can't tell if you're joking? If not, what do you think "lock-in" actually means?
It doesn't mean that it is impossible to leave, it means that there is substantial switching cost. And, that is certainly the case for github-hosted projects: all active contributors need to make a new account somewhere else, issues and discussions need to be migrated, CI workflows typically need to be rewritten, and good luck finding something that gives as much free compute for CI as github does. Yes, it's easy to mirror a git repo onto another service, but github is much much more than just git repo hosting and each of their features have their own switching cost.
Also, OP actually said "lock devs in" rather than "lock projects in" - I actually am forced to have a github account if i want to contribute to projects which refuse to move their issues off of it 😢 ... and the difficulty in creating new accounts anonymously these days prevents me from contributing to several things (lemmy, for instance) which i otherwise would.
That they'll lock you out of your repo without access to manage it, maybe? Or threaten you to make your software inoperable in Windows, if you don't comply? IDK, they can always think of sonething but if they think I don't already have full copies of my projects on my computer, they're deeply mistaken. 😂
in the computing context, "lock-in" is shorthand for vendor lock-in.