If the move away from American big tech is for practical reasons rather than political, there is no harm in using GitHub. The worry with using an American firm is that the US government could force the company to handover confidential information, or shut down access.

For open source code, there is no risk of confidential information being given to the US government (since there is no confidential information), and moving to another forge would be pretty simple if necessary.

tbh I was always of the mind that Github offers nothing over some slight convenience in hosting and some exposure, in exchange for the loss of control

Github had enough mindshare that for a small dev operation it was a form of social networking on top of actual code revision control, and one could get the occasional PR worth looking at; this consideration has essentially gone away as the amount of unreviewed vibecoded slop has skyrocketed

I know I'm biased but I'd run my own git server

but you're right that security is of no object here if you're code is OSS in the first place

What control do you lose with github that you want to maintain?

For any code you are sharing, I think you are underselling the hosting + sharing convenience. Everyone looks for projects on github, it is what people expect. Hosting it yourself requires managing user signups/accounts/permissions/etc.

Well, if you're using it like it's supposed to be used, all of it is accessible by a third party and its availability depends on them. It will all be potentially scrapped (meaning it will be). You are essentially outsourcing the hosting as well, with its pros and cons. I'm heavily biased against that, so it's not only a github thing but a "cloud computing culture" thing. I only use other people's computer when using my own is a real problem or it's just not feasible.

Maybe they have local copies as well, and just figured they might as well take GitHub’s free bandwidth and social networking features.

Next year: LeGit !

I propose gitgud.eu

Foul tarnished, I have given thee courtesy enough.

The full phrase is older than Demon Souls.

Or GitOobe.. although I like the idea of ÜberGit.eu

It's unfortunate that g.it isn't available.

I'm sure governments can ask the registrar to make it happen.

"la forge" in french is feminine, it would need to be LaGitette

Sounds legitimate

Fun fact: In french, Github, is pronounced « Guy Teube », where « Teube » is the backslang of « Bite », which can be literally translated by “Dick”.

So to give an example, is as if English speaking peoples would use a service named “Davedick”.

Exactly, we do have private forges we build and deploy from.

Surely everyone who uses GitHub has a local copy, that's pretty much how git works.

This is probably just the first big step (communications) in a series of big steps.

I remember seeing some projects by the French government on their self-hosted Gitlab. Maybe these are just public mirrors of their private repos?

The other commenter nailed it down. But I want to add that removing dependance on US companies is not some kind of spiteful act. It's purely down to both privacy and reliability.

Having private companies in the US becoming more involved with politics is fine for the US apperantly, but the EU just don't want to be involved.

Open standards, private software is the way to go. It makes sense for any entity to control their own destiny.

As if EU doesn’t involve itself with software, policy and censorship which has its own inherent risks

The EUs interests focus heavy on regulation, standardisation and privacy. They avoid letting private companies dictate the terms.

Isn't perfect, but it's getting better and it's a work in progress.

React is also from US, no?

What problem is hypothetically encountered by a US-originated OSS frontend framework dependency?

Hidden code, and perhaps long term inability to come up with your own solutions.