Utter chaos for a week, then a week or two of swearing at gitlab then the world would continue - since while we use github we don't really use github - it's just a shared git repository with a reasonably nice interface for reviewing code.

That's for my company, for many open source projects the damage would be more severe since they often heavily use issues and GH project management features.

The problem is that many people (including companies) use GH for more than just source code hosting. Bug tracking, CI/CD, artifact hosting, etc. That's not something most companies can replace in a week, unless GitLab (or others) have a seamless import tool. And even then, if GH is down or your account has been suspended, what do you import from?

Dont be naive. People depend on github for packages. Literary countless projects would fail to build.

There is literally nothing preventing someone to host they code on gitlab/sourcehut/their own gitea server. Most people use github because it is free, but the git protocol is far from centralized.

Thankfully `git clone kevin-wayne/algs4` doesn't default to asking github.com like some package managers [[docker]].