I think you’ve got it backwards. GitHub is by far the market leader for hosted repositories and maybe for CI too. This is like asking “Why are companies interested in using AWS?”

When one firm is so dominant for so long, the question is more like “Why shouldn’t we just use GitHub like 80% of software companies do?”

The issues they’ve had are almost all very recent. Very few companies have reevaluated that decision, because moving a big and well-integrated part of infrastructure is a huge project that delivers no value to the business. Speculating that you’ll have fewer development-slowing outages is not the most convincing when asking for the budget to do this. Plus, self-hosted isn’t necessarily going to have better uptime - mistakes happen.

I think before Actions, it would have been a lot easier to migrate off GH though. You’d just need to change a lot of repo URLs and find a way to set up webhooks from the new place to poke CI. Now with Actions, a lot lives in GH and in a proprietary flavor that doesn’t just ‘lift and shift.’

Most developers have experience using GitHub. The UI and concepts are familiar. The friction for adopting features like Actions is relatively low.

> 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.

I don’t know why you would even really need hosted git or why you’d be affected by its downtime. Git is decentralized by design. One node going down should not stop development. You don’t need a “central hub” to keep working.

I guess it’s all the other non-git stuff like issue tracking and other (unfortunately) centralized products on GitHub that causes disruption when they go down.

Weird how GitHub built itself around a distributed VC system and then made all its other services centralized.

Onboarding construct workers is super easy.