Written: August 15, 2024
Big Tech is going to cause some Big Problems in the future. I remember back in the day, projects and software developers would host their own instances of Bugzilla for bug tracking, Trac for tickets, code browsing, and wikis, Mediawiki for wikis, etc. For some reason, everyone decided that GitHub was the best place to store and collaborate. But has anyone considered what happens when Microsoft decides to sell or shut down GitHub? There are going to be a ton of repos that will be lost and there is a lot of workflow that will break. Developers will scrable to find another place to host their code.
This is one of the reasons why I run my own Git server (Gitlab self-hosted), because if I'm going to lose my code, then I'm going to be the one that loses it. Second, with the rise of AI, GitLab is a whole library of code for Microsoft to help OpenAI train models on. Afterall, they own the platform. Despite what they say, you know they can see private repos and repos that belong to companies, regardless of the license. This means that simply by using GitHub, your code can (and probably is) being used to train AI whether you like it or not. When your code is on your server, you get to set the rules. That can mean that you have a fully internal setup where no one can access your code from the Internet, you restrict access via VPN, or you just have it wide open and make it available through a reverse proxy.
Since it's clear that Big Tech does not have your best interests in mind, it's time to get back to self-hosting. While there isn't anything wrong with the cloud, self-hosting at least gives you full control (or at the very least, more control) over your data than SaaS.