Deleting my github sources
I deleted the repositories I own(ed) on #github.
After it became clear that Microsoft GitHub Copilot was trained using open source and GPLed work, keeping my (both public and private) github repositories is just wrong. So I deleted all of them, except for the forks I contribute to and maintain (for example config-rs and shiplift).
I hope that others will follow suit and delete their repositories as well. I can understand if people don't mind the vendor lock that “discussions”, “actions” and other features have created for them. But this (copilot) is pure abuse of free software codebases.
The “extend” phase is over, we're in the “extinguish” phase!
It might be legal for github to do this (IANAL), but nonetheless it is more than just a bad move. If their ToS allows this and we, as a community, can not act upon this because we agreed to these terms, the only sensible thing to do is to move our development away from github to some more open and less abusive services. I'm a big fan of sourcehut, of course, but there are others, most prominently codeberg and of course, self-hosting.
Self-hosting and email patches
I am self-hosting all my sources on git.beyermatthi.as plus I host some of these projects on my sourcehut account for more visibility. I take patches via mail for all my repositories.
If you plan on moving away from github, learning how to send patches via mail and of course also how to accept patches via mail is a viable skill that you will benefit from! Just make sure to use plain text email instead of html emails.
There are tons and tons of tutorials out there how to work with email patches. Just go and read them, it will make you a better developer, even if you then go to one of the other code forges and don't need the skill, you will start to understand why git works the way it works!
I am using git for over a decade now, over eight years in opensource and over two years professionally (so my whole professional career so far), and it is the one tool I cannot exist without! It amplifies the speed I develop code with by a magnitude!
If you don't want email...
If you don't want an email-based workflow for your git repositories, which I can understand (although not approve), and you want a shiny web-interface with all the bells and whistles, you can still go to codeberg (or gitlab.com, fwiw) or self-host one of the great tools that are already out there.
For example, you can self-host gitlab or gitea as a bit more lightweight alternative. Both of them feature issues/discussions and a nice web-UI.
If you don't want to collaborate but just put your code out there, you can use cgit (which is really not hard to host) plus, optionally, some gitolite if you want to host repositories for others as well.
With nginx as reverse-proxy and some mild rate-limiting because web-crawlers are still a thing, you can even host this on a $1-VPS instance somewhere (I'm not recommending any service here because this would be advertisement). I'd even say that a Raspberry Pi can handle hundreds of repositories with cgit and nginx as reverse proxy. I did not test this, though I'm fairly sure because git is very well optimized and cgit is written in C (hence the name), so there's only a very minimal footprint!