GitHub's outages and AI push drive some open-source projects to Codeberg

GitHub still looks dominant—600 million-plus repositories, a new user every second, and nearly a billion commits in 2025—but a handful of notable open-source projects have started walking away, and their reasons suggest the trickle could grow. Mitchell Hashimoto’s Ghostty terminal emulator announced an incremental exit in April 2026, the Zig programming language declared its departure in late 2025, and the Tenacity audio editor now keeps only a mirror on the platform. Others, including the Dillo browser and the Hare language, have already migrated, while projects like GNOME and much of Apache’s catalog never used GitHub at all.

Three grievances recur. Reliability tops the list: one tracker logged 112 hours of downtime across 48 major outages in a single year, and maintainers of both Ghostty and Zig cited instability as a trigger. Politics also factors in—Zig’s Andrew Kelley pointed to GitHub’s business relationship with ICE—as does the platform’s aggressive AI turn, exemplified by CEO Thomas Dohmke’s 2025 line that developers should embrace AI or leave the field. The GNU Project, meanwhile, has long refused GitHub on ideological grounds, objecting to its reliance on non-free JavaScript.

The departures are viable because credible alternatives now exist. Codeberg, built on the Forgejo forge, is the most common landing spot and offers issue tracking, static pages, and CI/CD comparable to GitHub. GitLab, Bitbucket, and the email-workflow-oriented Sourcehut round out the hosted options, while self-hosters can run Gitea or Forgejo directly. Advocacy efforts such as the Software Freedom Conservancy’s campaign are actively nudging developers toward the exit. None of this dethrones GitHub, but it underscores that Microsoft’s dominance in code hosting is no longer treated as inevitable.