Github stopped being a code platform and Open Source is going sovereign.
Almost 90% of the world's software ecosystem and supply chain relies on a single platform. The real risk is not the outages. It is what the platform is becoming.
Last week, Mitchell Hashimoto, co-founder of HashiCorp, whose infrastructure tools are used by hundreds of thousands of organizations, announced that Ghostty, his open source developer tool with over 50,000 community followers and a million weekly downloads, is leaving GitHub permanently. He kept a daily journal of platform failures for a month. Nearly every day had an entry. His conclusion: GitHub is "no longer a place for serious work".
He is not alone. The team behind the Zig programming language left months earlier, walking away from $170,000 per year in platform-tied donations, calling it a liability.
Downtime is a symptom. The real story is what happened to the platform's priorities.
After its CEO departed last year, Microsoft folded GitHub into its AI division. No replacement was appointed. No independent roadmap. The platform is now managed as a data pipeline for training AI models, not as engineering infrastructure. The decay followed: 112 hours of major downtime in twelve months. A bug that silently deleted work developers had already finished and approved. A critical security flaw that left enterprise servers exposed weeks after patches were available.
For open-source software in particular, the irony is hard to overstate. It is built on the principle that code should be free, transparent, and community-governed. Yet most of it is hosted on a closed platform controlled by a single US corporation. That was always a contradiction. It took a crisis to make it visible.
But replacing GitHub with another corporate service solves nothing. It is swapping one landlord for another. The address changes; the power dynamic does not. Your code, your deployment systems, your security credentials, still inside someone else's building, still subject to someone else's priorities.
So the real question goes deeper than just "which platform". It is "who controls the infrastructure".
New EU regulations require organizations to prove full control over their digital supply chains. Storing critical intellectual property under US jurisdiction creates compliance exposure that a contract amendment cannot fix.
Good news is, the infrastructure for independence already exists. Forgejo, a German non-profit, hosts a free platform on European infrastructure, already powering the full build-and-ship process for projects that left GitHub. Tangled, a Helsinki-based startup backed by GitHub's own former CEO, is building a network where organizations host and control their own code, no central platform required. Peer-to-peer systems let teams collaborate with no central server.
Builders are already moving. Where does your organization's code live in three years, and who is making that decision?
