> Honest question, why are companies interested in hosting on github?

Mostly boils down to marketing and easier to establish a community. Almost every developer has an account there, leading to network effects being much larger, so if you're a new FOSS project, finding contributors and getting your project in front of other's eyes is much easier when you're on GitHub compared to your own Forgejo instance.

With that said, I'd question if chasing "most external one-time contributors" or GitHub stars is the right way to actually run a FOSS project, personally I'd avoid thinking about those vanity-numbers as much as possible and focus on the project, code and contributors themselves.

But, I've literally heard those two arguments for "why GitHub" countless of times over the years.

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Mashimo 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Oh FOSS projects I totally understand. It's where I go to too.

But closed source companies surly don't need to establish a community?

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embedding-shape 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Go with the flow, don't rock the boat and use what developers already know, are probably the most cited reasons I've heard.

I've tried so many times in the past to argue for self-hosted setup that you fully control if you can afford it, things just get so much smoother and if you're a software development company, you probably want to own the software development workflow E2E so you can actually ship as fast as you want.

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Esophagus4 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I’ve argued the opposite most of the time in build vs buy. Buy in almost every case unless it’s a real competitive advantage to you.

I know developers love to build, but do you think:

1) self-hosting git provides any competitive edge to the business over letting someone manage it?

2) it provides so much value that you’re willing to fund engineers to build, secure, support this on an ongoing basis?

I’ve found the answer to those is No in both cases.

The same reason you wouldn’t build your own internal chat tool, you’d use Slack. And you wouldn’t bother self-hosting your own Jira or documentation.

Code hosting is code hosting, there’s no difference where it's hosted. There’s no slowdown in delivery with using GitHub - their March uptime was 99.5% which annoys some commenters but it’s fine. That’s 45 minutes downtime per month which is tolerable.

You would spend way more effort and money building a jenky self-hosted solution to end up with a worse result.

	▲	oasisaimlessly 15 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		You don't have to 'build' anything. Just spin up a GitLab docker container. Bonus: If you put it behind a VPN, you never have to worry about updating it.

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idkyall 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Usually, at large enough corporations, it's one of two things. Some random project gets open sourced, and it ends up on Github(see, for example, Salesforce) - or, more commonly, some subsidiary or acquisition had github and has either refused to migrate to the internal source system or the hassle of migration isn't worth it.