why does anything needs to be open source in the first place?
Open-sourcing something should add value. Github doesn't see any value in doing so (and i would agree). It's not like github has any secret ingredient that makes github source special - gitlab has replicated most of github's functionality, and so has many open hosting platforms.
The value of github is mindshare, rather than anything code wise.
> why does anything needs to be open source in the first place?
Not advocating FOSS approach for anything, and I'm not strictly speaking of GH in that context, but generally, malicious code loves being hidden into closed source software since it's the best effective way to keep it hard to control and correct.
When privacy, security, safety, accountability become important, the FOSS approach might solve a problems or two.
Of course the downside is that everyone can look at it, so building a billions worth business out of a fork + 10 line changes + renaming of a FOSS project cannot work without violating the license by keeping it closed.
On the flipside, it's more plausible for an actor to get malicious code into a project in order to infect a target. Sure it has to be obscure enough to pass any code reviews during PR and/or involves compromising a contributor but it is possible and something I see happening in the next 10 years.
I'm also genuinely curious how many people actively review all the code they actually run. I doubt anybody but the very largest tech companies and high-end government would actually be able to afford and resources such a feat, and even then they would have DMZ-type areas to detonate unaudited software.
There are so many issues with GitHub that could be easily addressed if open sourced. So many in fact that there are entire unofficial GitHub repos dedicated to raising issues about GitHub. They won’t see any benefit now that they are owned by MS and slowly being integrated to AzureDevOps, but they could definitely have had a much improved platform if they had opened years ago.
It’s actually the opposite, Microsoft is slowly killing Azure DevOps in favor of GitHub. That’s why Actions is getting so much traction and why codespaces on Azure was killed.
why does anything needs to be open source in the first place?
Open-sourcing something should add value. Github doesn't see any value in doing so (and i would agree). It's not like github has any secret ingredient that makes github source special - gitlab has replicated most of github's functionality, and so has many open hosting platforms.
The value of github is mindshare, rather than anything code wise.