[xp84]

I think you’ve got it backwards. GitHub is by far the market leader for hosted repositories and maybe for CI too. This is like asking “Why are companies interested in using AWS?”

When one firm is so dominant for so long, the question is more like “Why shouldn’t we just use GitHub like 80% of software companies do?”

The issues they’ve had are almost all very recent. Very few companies have reevaluated that decision, because moving a big and well-integrated part of infrastructure is a huge project that delivers no value to the business. Speculating that you’ll have fewer development-slowing outages is not the most convincing when asking for the budget to do this. Plus, self-hosted isn’t necessarily going to have better uptime - mistakes happen.

I think before Actions, it would have been a lot easier to migrate off GH though. You’d just need to change a lot of repo URLs and find a way to set up webhooks from the new place to poke CI. Now with Actions, a lot lives in GH and in a proprietary flavor that doesn’t just ‘lift and shift.’

[Mashimo]

> I think you’ve got it backwards. GitHub is by far the market leader for hosted repositories

Maybe, but I never heard about any company using github for internal projects in my real life. For me it was always to go to for open source projects.

Then again it's not a topic that often comes up in my developer circles.

[taormina]

I think I worked at one company that used BitBucket instead of GitHub but GitHub has been the main place for the internal company repos everywhere else I’ve worked. GitHub is quite popular for any sort of git hosting.

[jcgrillo]

More than half the companies I have worked for use Github. The others used Atlassian tools which were at least as bad from a reliability perspective and much less nice to use (IMO).

[xp84]

For me it’s been every company since 2010.

[jcgrillo]

> The issues they’ve had are almost all very recent.

It has been bad for at least 18mo, maybe longer? I recall multiple work impacting outages at my previous employer extending back into 2024. Maybe even earlier than that?

[taormina]

In the lifespan of Git and GitHub that’s all very recent.

[jcgrillo]

But on the timescale of tech it's a long time. When a service has serious availability issues for like 7 quarters straight that's.. I mean, it's why we're all talking about it.

[xp84]

CircleCI has been this bad for 10+ years and they’re still in business.