Github and the question of access

Your post Ownership and access made me think about an excellent article I read recently by Edward Loveall called Let's Make Sure Github Doesn't Become the only Option. I know it's not a perfect comparison, but I do think there are some similarities between the question of how we access digital assets and how we access digital tools and whether or what exactly we "own".

A few key statements from Edward's article:

GitHub’s dominance is a risk to the software industry. Making GitHub the primary platform gives one company the power to put their needs over yours, or the industry’s.

Don’t mistake their feature development for charity. They are a large business with a financially driven leadership team and a product roadmap. Their goals only align with yours if your goal is to make GitHub more profitable.

He goes on to list a whole host of potentially problematic issues with one company dominating the space. To summarize GitHub could:

• Go out of business
• Remove features you rely on
• Make ethical decisions that you disagree with
• Lock in sub-optimal ways of working
• Exclude people who don't have access to the tools from the larger community

I think a lot of these issues apply to all such "hosted" platforms that offer convenience in exchange for ownership for digital resources. While it's true that, in GitHub's case, you still have access to your code locally, many features (workflows, PRs, issues, boards and static pages to name a few) are locked in the GitHub ecosystem and create a barrier to leaving.

In terms of ethical decisions, I just talked about how they're now vacuuming up and repackaging your code (possibly in violation of licenses) and then reselling it to customers in the form of copilot. If you're not okay with that but yet have built your whole devops pipeline around GitHub actions then you're out of luck.

Again, I have the sense that a lot of this applies to other platforms hosting tools or music or movies, but don't have a super nuanced argument for that. My wife is a graphics designer and I've watched her monthly costs skyrocket after Adobe locked in the market and swapped to a subscription service. Steam has made decisions I don't love and yet all of the games I've purchased over the last several years are on there and I'm basically stuck. Mailchimp recently drastically reduced their free tier and started ratcheting up their monthly pricing, forcing nonprofit groups to scramble or incur a major expense.

I don't expect companies to not make money, but I'm more and more suspicious of the tradeoff being incurred in exchange for convenience and "free" tiers. It feels like the entire online industry discovered the massive financial benefits associated with monthly fees at the same time. As with many things this seems obvious in hindsight. For many of us a monthly charge almost fades into the background and, in fact, there are monthly services to help you cancel your monthly services now.

Do I wish I hadn't purchased games on Steam? No. Am I listening to YouTube Music at this very moment? Yes. So I'm obviously no purist, but I also have a default aversion to many platforms, and go out of my way to own and host my own tools and data when I reasonably can.