[jillesvangurp]

You can self host Gitlabs. I did that a few years back and it's quite nice. It has a similar feature set to Github. Gitlab these days is a perfectly good alternative and it's popular as well though not nearly as popular as Github.

Self hosted gitlab is nice, until you realize that you can get the same functionality for free from Github and any second of devops spent on your self hosted thing is technically just money down the drain. In our case, I got a little worried about our flaky backups and the fact we were using a single node vm in AWS to host this. The fix would have been increasing cost by spending on more vms and devops. Instead, we switched to Github. And that was before they had free plans with unlimited repositories and developers. We actually paid for it and saved money (not to mention stress). These days it's a no-brainer because at 0$ per month you get source hosting, CI via github actions, and all the rest. I'd actually gladly pay for it before considering other options. But it seems MS has decided that's not worth the effort.

The thing with OSS is that it's not the world you want but the world we all build together. Plenty of people that want stuff but rarely enough that go out there and actually build it, persist with building it, find the right people to collaborate with to get things done, and then collectively deliver results. That takes a platform to collaborate on and for better or worse that platform is Github and git.

Mercurial just never got of the ground as a mainstream solution and fell behind as Git got more popular. It had a shot as long as it was the third option (along with subversion and git) on Sourceforge before Github was a thing. But then Github happened and offered a nice UI for pull requests and that turned out to have been the killer feature developers wanted and needed.