At one point Gitlab seemed like it wanted to compete, but then they killed all the personal and SMB plans, and now they’re just out of the picture for a lot of people. Their team plan is more expensive that GH’s enterprise plan.

IPO and quarterly demand for profit.

Gitlab was generous first, to rise as a valid alternative to GitHub. They never got the comminity aspect right, perhaps aiming for profitability with a focus on the runners instances which is how they make money.

With profitability, the IPO made sense.

GitHub probably had a different strategy..keep it generous, get the entire open source community, keep raising money and one day someone will buys us out for billions. We we are, Microsoft goal is to capture the community, it works. It's sticky.

Codeberg is a nonprofit community project aiming to replicate that. You can use it today.

I've used it, it's great, more like what GitHub was meant to be.

There is Forgejo. I find it more stable, I self host that. It never suffered an outage in 2 years that I had it running and is faster than GitHub.

Codeberg is a public instance of the Forgejo software, which you can also host yourself.

Yes, but this also means that countless open-source projects are in what appears to be a precarious position. What if MS one day decides all this free hosting isn't worth it, and just cuts it off? There aren't really any alternatives I know of, except bad ol' Sourceforge I guess.