Democracy Kicks Ass

Everyone was up in arms in August about GitHub's new status as a department of Microsoft instead of a subsidiary of Microsoft. Understandable, I guess. Moving it into their CoreAI department makes their vision for the world's leading open source collaboration platform very clear, and it's at odds with what a lot of that community actually wants.

For me the uproar about it fell a little bit flat though. Since July I've been getting about an email per week inviting me to vote on a new community decision at Codeberg, and all this newfound agency has made that kind of impotent anger harder to identify with. So instead of feeling swept up by the collective dismay about the direction Microsoft is steering GitHub, all I could think about was the raw potential in it.

Here's an example. For a while now I've been following a debate in the Codeberg community about licensing. Codeberg only provides free hosting for projects with free licenses, and there's a lack of clarity about exactly which licenses count as "free enough". Opinions vary about how broad the criteria should be and the discussions have been interesting to read along with.

I'd been reading all this with the same old-fashioned mentality of powerlessness that you get used to as a user of an undemocratic platform operated on a for-profit basis under the dictatorship of a company. Then last week I suddenly got one of these poll notification emails inviting me to cast my vote on the decision and I was slightly taken aback by it. This had been the whole point of joining the Codeberg e.V. but somehow each time that decision pays off it's a surprise all over again.

So it seems like it's taking a little while to acclimatise and raise my expectations up to a new level of agency and dignity. But at the same time, seeing all that despair about Microsoft's utterly predictable consolidation of control over GitHub made me understand how much of a mindset shift I've already undergone.

Joining the Codeberg e.V. is becoming one of my favourite little decisions of 2025. With the profit-driven side of the industry disappearing up its own arsehole to deliver an AI revolution few of us seem to actually want, I think it's a unique opportunity for a community-led non-profit like Codeberg to gain ground. And it's really exciting to imagine the potential second-order effects on the industry in general if more of us get a taste of what this kind of democratic model can deliver.