I wonder if Microsoft will ever get that asking users before making changes can help them avoid looking bad in public.

Maybe half of all clients I work with use GitHub Actions for CI (the rest basically all use Jenkins), most of those using Actions use self-hosted runners for performance and security reasons, almost all of them reached out to me asking how difficult it would be to move away from GitHub Actions yet continue using GitHub.

Do you think these companies now suddenly stop wanting to move away from GitHub Actions because Microsoft suddenly changed their mind? I don't think so, probably less priority, but it will happen, because now the cat is out of the bag.

If they'd just do user research before announcing changes and not use announcements as "testing the waters", I'm sure they'd see a lot less churn. But I guess some number counting team somewhere in Microsoft figured out they'd make more money by charging people to run software on their own hardware, so maybe I'm just dreaming.

That would be my guess, I know personally yesterday I finally setup Forgejo and today I plan to evaluate its runners or even just using a dedicated CI like woodpecker.

Not fully sure what I will do regarding any open source repo's yet, but at least anything private I am already in the process of moving away.

This was something I already wanted to do for privacy concerns (especially possibility using private repo's to train AI) so this was just the push I needed.

> Now if only they would listen to the feedback about windows 11 and their forced copilot we might be onto something.

You can just uninstall Copilot? It’s nowhere on my Surface Laptop 7 with W11.

I've already jumped ship. Switching source control host was actually pretty easy. Builds still working just fine.

We jumped ship too. Forgejo has been amazing.

> Now if only they would listen to the feedback about windows 11 and their forced copilot

I think they'll take the opposite lesson. Copilot hasn’t lost them many users because Windows users are locked into the ecosystem and unable to leave. They will try to get GitHub into a position similar to that and then try this shit again.

I feel like I could specify and vibe-code a CI workflow system that would be dramatically better (for a single organization’s workflow) than GitHub Actions. And hosting it would be barely more complex than hosting a GitHub Actions self-hosted runner.

The stack would be:

Postgres, as a job queue and job status tracker. The entire control plane state lives in here. Even in a fairly large org, the transaction rate would be very, very low.

An ingestion agent. Monitors the repository for pushes and PRs.

A job agent. This runs a in a sandbox and gets the inputs from GitHub and runs what is effectively a workflow step. It doesn’t get any secrets — everything it wants to do is either accomplished in the form of JSON output, blob output, or an org-specific API for doing things that don’t fit the JSON output model.

A thing to handle results. This is a simple service, connected to the database, that consumes the JSON job results and does whatever is needed (which would mostly consist of commenting on PRs or updating a CI status dashboard). For CD workflows, the build artifacts would be sent to whatever registry they go to.

A configuration system, which would be some files somewhere, maybe in a git repository that is not the repository that CI is being done on. (GitHub’s model of Actions config being in-band in the repository is IMO entirely wrong.)

And that’s about it.

I’m not suggesting that I could duplicate the GitHub Actions in a weekend. But I wouldn’t want to. This would be single-tenant, and it would support exactly the features that the organization actually uses. Heck, even par-for-the-course things like SSO aren’t needed because the entire system would have no users per se :)