Github does not own git, it only owns the UI that they've built on top of it. You can simply clone the repo and take it somewhere else and you can find an open source UI replacement to put on top too (e.g. Gitlab).

Github is free to use for open source projects, self-hosting by the government would only make it more expensive for the tax payer.

> Github ... owns the UI that they've built on top of it

That's the problem though. In principal, if they only use pure-git operations in the process, it would be easy to move at any point. But if they leverage the entire Github platform, i.e. PR discussion, issue tracking etc, then important parts of the legal history will be bound to the github platform.

And that's not great. Github is free for public projects for now, but as with any publicly traded tech company, they're able to change the terms of use of their product at any time to suit the needs of the company.

When we're talking about enshrining the laws of society, we're talking about a very long-term proposition. Technology companies pivot and or kill products all the time. What if we decided to record legislative history on Google Flow?

We take long-term access to the law very seriously. For the reasons you give, we rely only on native git operations. PRs are a convenient interface, nothing more.

There are technical solutions that could be used here. You can JSON dump the PR contents and Issue contents, for example, into another repository (or a branch in the same repository). It wouldn't be hard to automate that process with the GitHub API.

That doesn't solve the interop problem that would exist in trying to implement secondary UI systems that can redisplay that information usefully, but ETL of that sort is full of options and developers with experience.

JSON dumps of GitHub information would be useful to more open source projects beyond legislative history. I think a good automated solution could be generally useful, if someone wanted to invest in it.

What stops GitHub from banning certain IPs from accessing their service?

Presumably a federal government contract can have these clauses built-in.

They also have self-hosted enterprise contracts so I'm sure something like that could be done if the government were interested.

Git is decentralized so it doesn't really matter where it's hosted. Github works since it's free, but everyone who checks out the source will have the full git history and so also becomes another repository. Easy to move a git repo to somewhere else.

While this can be argued to be true of git in a technical sense, virtually all git projects in practice have a central source of truth repository. GitHub’s entire business model is largely predicated on the fact projects will use it as their primary repository.

If we are talking about accepting PRs for drafting legislation in git, where it is hosted and who hosts it becomes extremely important. Sure anyone can clone/fork, but only the appointed central repo could become law. A clone that you or I make will likely never have this ability.

Yes, need to agree on a central place to push/pull and create PRs from. But my point is that right now people are using GitHub but if any point they want to change, or GitHub go down (or change licensing etc), they aren't beholden to them. Just push the git repository to somewhere else and agree to that. Other developers would confirm the git repo is the same.