The great GitHub goodbye?
Plus: Anthropic has a Bun in the oven, some gâteau for Black Forest, & more
Hi folks,
This week’s lead story looks at the quiet but telling stream of open source projects peeling themselves away from GitHub, and what their reasons reveal about shifting attitudes toward dependence on a single dominant platform.
Elsewhere, there’s a major runtime acquisition in the JavaScript world, a hefty new funding round for open weights imaging, fresh open model releases, and a sweep of new tooling from Nvidia.
As usual, feel free to reach out to me with any questions, tips, or suggestions: forkable[at]pm.me.
Paul
Open issue
Calling time on GitHub
The open source world continues to revolve around one platform: GitHub, the dominant code-hosting platform owned by Microsoft. But that centrality has begun to look a little shaky, as a stream of developers and projects publicly distance themselves from the service.
In the past week alone, the Zig programming language and the Dillo browser project announced full migrations away from GitHub, with Zig citing a mix of technical frustrations and discomfort with GitHub’s increasingly AI-centric direction.
While Rodrigo Arias Mallo from Dillo pointed to a number of technical factors that made GitHub less suitable for the project, including the site’s heavy reliance on JavaScript and its increasingly resource-hungry interface, he also highlighted GitHub representing a “single point of failure” that concentrated too much control in one place.
“I don’t mean that GitHub is stored in a single machine, but it is controlled by a single entity which can unilaterally ban our repository or account and we would lose the ability to notify in that URL what happened,” Mallo wrote. “This can cause data loss if we don’t have a local copy of all the data.”
Andrew Kelley, president and lead developer of the Zig Software Foundation, said the project’s decision stemmed from mounting concerns about GitHub’s reliability and shifting priorities — particularly around AI.
“After the CEO of GitHub said to ‘embrace AI or get out’, it seems the lackeys at Microsoft took the hint, because GitHub Actions started ‘vibe-scheduling’; choosing jobs to run seemingly at random,” Kelley wrote. “Combined with other bugs and inability to manually intervene, this causes our CI system to get so backed up that not even master branch commits get checked.”
In late summer, the open source space trading game Naev also revealed it was ditching GitHub, framing its move as both a philosophical and practical realignment: moving to a Forgejo-based host promised a more stable, values-aligned home and more freedom from the gravitational pull of a corporate-owned ecosystem.
“Ever since Microsoft bought GitHub, we felt that the days we could stay on the platform were numbered,” project’s developer team wrote. “Despite that, Naev has stayed on GitHub passed [sic] our expectations, but now it seems like it is finally the time to get off the platform due to a combination of Microsoft supporting and pushing for quite bad things that we have never been able to ethically support.”
Others, too have made similar decisions in recent years. Back in 2022, I reported for TechCrunch that the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) was quitting GitHub, calling on all open source developers to follow suit. The group argued that GitHub had trained its AI coding assistant Copilot on vast amounts of open source code without adequate transparency or respect for the licences governing those projects, effectively turning community work into a proprietary commercial product. It framed Copilot as a threat to software freedom, contending that GitHub’s approach undermined the norms of consent, credit, and reciprocity that open source communities rely on.
Across the spate of recent departures, a common thread emerges: maintainers are increasingly uneasy with relying on a single corporate-controlled code-hosting platform, whose priorities feel out of step with their own. Concerns span the practical — unreliable CI pipelines, performance quirks, and ecosystem friction — to the ideological, including discomfort with GitHub’s accelerating AI focus and the opaque licensing questions that come with it. For minimalist or resource-sensitive projects, the appeal of simpler, self-hosted infrastructure has grown, while others frame the move as a matter of open source principles and long-term autonomy.
While it would be something of a stretch to call the recent spate of migrations a major “trend” (the powers that be at Microsoft and GitHub are unlikely to lose much sleep), it does reflect a broader desire to reclaim control, reduce dependency, and align tooling with the values of the communities that rely on it. Collectively, these exits also resonate with another development unfolding beyond the open source world: the growing push among European institutions to distance themselves from Microsoft’s gravitational pull.
Across Europe, a steady political drumbeat has been urging both the public and public institutions to loosen their dependence on Big Tech. Earlier this year, Signal briefly became the most downloaded app in the Netherlands, while governments and public bodies more broadly have begun replacing parts of their Microsoft-heavy stacks with open source alternatives.
Last month, Forkable reported that the International Criminal Court (ICC) is replacing Microsoft Office with OpenDesk — a European open-source productivity suite developed under Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund. The reason? Sanctions imposed by the U.S. on ICC staff, which reportedly led some ICC staff — including Prosecutor Karim Khan — to lose access to key Microsoft services.
It’s a similar story elsewhere, as a growing constellation of public sector organisations map out futures that are less dependent on any one company’s cloud, productivity suite, or security model. And in that light, the open source projects quietly peeling themselves away from GitHub begin to reflect that wider shift: a slow, uneven but perceptible move toward greater autonomy in the tools people build, use and depend on.
Patch notes
Anthropic’s honey Bun
Anthropic has acquired the JavaScript runtime Bun, folding the tool and its team into its wider developer platform, just as Anthropic says Claude Code passed a $1 billion annualised revenue milestone. Bun will remain open source under an MIT licence, and Anthropic says it plans to keep investing in its role as a high-performance runtime, bundler, package manager and test runner for JavaScript and TypeScript developers.
Read more: Anthropic
Black Forest has its gâteau and eats it
German frontier AI lab Black Forest Labs has raised $300 million at a $3.25 billion valuation, to scale its open weights image-generation models. The investment positions the company as a significant European counterweight in generative imaging, highlighting an ongoing appetite for more “open” approaches in foundation-model development.
Read more: Black Forest Labs
Nvidia accelerates open model development
Nvidia this week unveiled a sweeping set of open models, datasets and frameworks, from speech and safety AI to robotics and autonomous-vehicle toolkits. At the centre is DRIVE Alpamayo-R1 (AR1), described as the world’s first industry-scale open reasoning vision-language-action model for autonomous-driving research. Alongside AR1, Nvidia released synthetic-data tools, robotics simulation frameworks and open safety models.
Read more: Nvidia
OpenAGI steps out of stealth
A new startup, OpenAGI, emerged from stealth this week with an AI agent it claims can outperform existing systems, including those from OpenAI. The company presents its agent as a general-purpose problem-solver for complex, multi-step tasks and has open sourced parts of its infrastructure, including its OSGym training engine and SDK.
Read more: VentureBeat & OpenAGI
Mistral turns the dial to 3
French AI startup Mistral has released its latest family of open models, Mistral 3, continuing its strategy of offering high-performance systems under permissive licences. The update strengthens the company’s push to compete with larger U.S. players, while giving developers and enterprises modifiable alternatives to proprietary models.
Read more: Mistral
And finally…
No longer evil…
When Google announced it was discontinuing support for older Nest thermostats, it served as yet another reminder of how quickly connected devices can slip from “smart” to, well, useless.
Luckily, a new community-driven project has stepped in to keep those units breathing. No Longer Evil is courtesy of researcher and developer Cody Kociemba, who says he was banned from the Google Play Store without explanation and has little faith left in Google’s stewardship of smart-home devices.
The project offers a workaround (open source, natch) that restores core functionality for the abandoned hardware, ensuring the thermostats continue to operate long after their official sunset.
It’s a modest fix, but a satisfying one: a tiny act of resistance against the quiet decay of perfectly good hardware.
Read more: Liliputing & No Longer Evil