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Programming Microsoft

OpenAI Is Developing an Alternative To GitHub (reuters.com) 61

OpenAI is reportedly developing a code-hosting platform that could compete with GitHub, The Information reported on Tuesday. "If OpenAI does sell the product, it would mark a bold move by the creator of ChatGPT to compete directly against Microsoft, which holds a significant stake in the firm," notes Reuters. From the report: Engineers from OpenAI encountered a rise in service disruptions that rendered GitHub unavailable in recent months, which ultimately prompted the decision to develop the new product, the report said. The OpenAI project is in its early stages and likely will not be completed for months, according to The Information. Employees working on it have considered making the code repository available for purchase to OpenAI's customer base.
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OpenAI Is Developing an Alternative To GitHub

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  • by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Tuesday March 03, 2026 @09:03PM (#66021562) Homepage Journal

    So Gitlab, or Bitbucket, Beanstalk, Launchpad, Sourceforge, ... I'm sure I'm overlooking 70 others.

    • by coopertempleclause ( 7262286 ) on Tuesday March 03, 2026 @09:21PM (#66021580)
      Forgejo/Codeberg would be a major one. You can even host Forgejo yourself to actually own your own code.
      • by AuMatar ( 183847 )

        You can do that with github and many of the others as well. My employer has a private github.

        • by AleRunner ( 4556245 ) on Wednesday March 04, 2026 @04:14AM (#66021872)

          You can do that with github and many of the others as well. My employer has a private github.

          You don't have the source code, so at any point they can take that ability away from you and the first serious vulnerability will make it unsustainable. Also you have no control over the direction of the future of the software. With Codeberg, if they start to do weird stuff like forcing you into AI as Microsoft is doing with GitHub, then you can fork yourself at any point you wish and, more importantly in the case of Codeberg, given that many of the people who have abandoned GitHub due to Microsoft's new policies, it's almost certain that someone else will do the forking for you before you are even aware there's a problem.

    • or... git? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      They're an actual company. They don't need to use Github. They can just run Git on their own computers.

      As their IP is worth the better part of a trillion dollars I don't think they'd trust any company which doesn't already have access to their code.

      • My trillion dollar employer would run an old version of gitlab internally and we could point a few of the AI tools at it if you setup the access tokens for it.

      • They're an actual company. They don't need to use Github. They can just run Git on their own computers.

        As their IP is worth the better part of a trillion dollars I don't think they'd trust any company which doesn't already have access to their code.

        In a sense that's what they are doing. They just have one big central coordinating multi-server "computer" (actually cluster) which helps coordinate their use of github.

        The magic with GitHub includes

        • efficient handling of massive git repositories which would otherwise be too slow, including dedicated proprietary git object storage
        • a nice coordinating UI which includes a CLI useful for advanced users and also a GUI so simple you can point a product owner at it
        • good ways to manage central repositories which all
        • sorry, 5s/github/git/ - makes the comment clearer

        • Should have given a link to Forgejo [codeberg.org]. It's under a better license for protecting the user, so that's the one you will want to use for actual code hosting. GitLab is under the MIT license unfortunately.

        • Aye, I run a large on-prem GitLab for my org.

          GitLab's CI Runner stuff is light years ahead of GitHub's, who just brought something similar online in least year or so. It's works fine, but I've found it more fiddly to setup. GitLab's runner setup is trivial at this point.

          Running on-prem, where people are pushing and pulling multi-gigabyte repos over the 1Gbps LAN in a couple seconds is such a huge win.

    • Yeah but this one will have a purple UI with drop shadow cards!
    • All I ask is that they keep old repositories around forever. I've seen some repos lost, like PhonebookFS, which could be really useful these days.

      PhonebookFS was a FUSE mounted filesystem that had multiple layers. Mount one layer, get a different set of files than another layer. Even then, there was a bit or random sized "chaff" which was not owned by any layer in the PhonebookFS, providing plausible deniability.

    • Ah, but do those other projects run spiders that steal code from every code repo out there and replicate it on their own servers, just so that it's easy to train on? OpenAI has the clear incentive to do that, so that they can claim their code training data is legally above board, complete with fake user agreements.
    • Yeah, but are any of those a pipeline directly into OpenAI's LLMs?

  • by Quakeulf ( 2650167 ) on Tuesday March 03, 2026 @09:18PM (#66021574)

    it's important to know if they are leading by example.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      If they want it to work, they'll vibe code it with Claude.

      The reality is that Claude remains the best choice for most (all?) programming work. If anything, ChatGPT is a distant third (after Gemini).

    • by Luthair ( 847766 )
      Yea, I was wondering how far normal people would trust a vibe coded platform with something mission critical
  • Oh boy! (Score:5, Informative)

    by dskoll ( 99328 ) on Tuesday March 03, 2026 @09:29PM (#66021604) Homepage

    What is this, 754th in a line of things nobody asked for and nobody wants? When there are already open-source replacements for GitHub out there anyway?

    • Yeah I wouldn't trust this as far as I can throw it. I can guarantee these clowns are gonna vibe-code it, so its gonna be filled with absolutely idiotic foot-guns , and lets face it OAI is not long for this world. They've got no viable path to profitability and are selling AGI on a model that is physically incapable of anything more than "1 extremely well read and fast human" because its never had anything smarter than a human in its training set.

      • Even if they had 100% human labor going into it, I certainly wouldn't trust them any further than Microsoft, which I don't trust at all. That is to say, if they demonstrated competence they would be even worse.

    • by Junta ( 36770 )

      Your problem is thinking of this as a technical situation, but it's business posturing instead.

      Anthropic has pretty much monopolized the vibecode bros and has near exclusive credibility, with Github Copilot getting some attention thanks to Microsoft business relationships, VSCode, and Github clout, but largely only because they explicitly give access to Anthropic models, so you can use AI-augmented familiar workflows and UIs with Anthropic's models.

      It also is turning out that vibecode folks are the ones fir

  • SlopHub (Score:5, Funny)

    by Required Snark ( 1702878 ) on Tuesday March 03, 2026 @09:43PM (#66021626)
    The obvious name.
  • Trust (Score:5, Insightful)

    by systemd-anonymousd ( 6652324 ) on Tuesday March 03, 2026 @10:01PM (#66021642)

    Gee, why wouldn't I trust Scam Altman with even more of my data?

  • by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Tuesday March 03, 2026 @10:19PM (#66021654)

    I asked ChatGPT what to call a site with the following parameters:

    * the content is AI slop code
    * distributes content to a second and third-parties
    * anyone dumb enough to it is going to get fucked

    Top answer: Sloppy Seconds

    • by dskoll ( 99328 )

      Anyone going to fork sloppy seconds?

    • by shanen ( 462549 )

      Good Funny, but I don't believe you that ChatGPT came up with that answer. If so, then I'm seriously worried about that (human) comic writer's career I never had.

      • Worry not, your hypothetical career choice is safe.

        • by shanen ( 462549 )

          I resemble that remark but I still don't believe you that "Sloppy Seconds" was ChatGPT's idea.

          But seriously folks, I was dabbling with standup comedy (mostly in English) when Covid shut things down. However there was never any risk of a career that anyone could detect, even when I was much younger. My longest stint with one employer was only about 16 years...

          • I still don't believe you that "Sloppy Seconds" was ChatGPT's idea.

            As was implied by my previous comment, it was not.

            • by shanen ( 462549 )

              Thanks for clarifying. I went back to check and I still don't see your implication.

              But I have another disproof of the concept of my getting funny anytime soon. Here's today's attempt. My implicit humor is so week that I have to say it's supposed to be a joke:

              So one day Musk's pet GROK told the YOB that the summary of Article 2 of ye olde Constitution means "You can do whatever you want." And look what happened.

              Are we seeing a proof by contradiction of Kant's Categorical Imperative or is the YOB about to ref

              • I still don't see your implication.

                "If [ChatGPT came up with that answer], then I'm seriously worried about that (human) comic writer's career I never had."
                Here you are worried about a hypothetical career choice.

                "Worry not, your hypothetical career choice is safe."
                My response is that your hypothetical career is safe which implies ChatGPT did not come up with the answer, since it was the potential danger.

  • How hard can it be for an AI to write a Github like core without all the bloat of GitHub?

    • You mean git? It's been done already. Didn't even need AI shockingly. Developers wrote it on stone tablets.
      • by HiThere ( 15173 )

        But git doesn't have a nice screen interface.

          • by Meneth ( 872868 )

            What is git gui?

            It's functional, but written in Tcl/Tk, so the JavaScript addicts can't theme it.

        • by gtall ( 79522 )

          I use Tower, it provides a handy git screen interface and is easy to understand how it packages git into something nice. I never could stomach command line interfaces; that's the developer telling you they do not understand the mental model of their shit well enough to present it properly.

          • by HiThere ( 15173 )

            No. It's telling you they aren't using a screen driven model for their design. Not everyone does. OTOH, command line models have always had a trouble being sold to a wide audience.

            That said, I prefer a good visual + mouse interface, as to most people...but not everyone does. And text based interfaces can often be much more efficient.

        • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          Yes. It's got lots of other features too.

  • by peppepz ( 1311345 ) on Wednesday March 04, 2026 @04:15AM (#66021874)
    Who knows, these days; it might just happen that the code you push there ends up being used to train an AI that could fire you (if you're American) or kill you (if you are from elsewhere). Not being evil is all good, but those sweet Pentagon contracts...
  • by nextTimeIsTheLast ( 6188328 ) on Wednesday March 04, 2026 @04:23AM (#66021878)
    I switched to self hosted Forgejo some time ago, haven't looked back since. Just need to make sure it's well backed up (which mine is!). Ii really hate being beholden to these mega corps!
  • I heard that nowadays you just write a prompt to an AI and then you have an army of agents build a SaaS platform over night. Is that not what was promised and made all stocks tumble?
  • by TrentTheThief ( 118302 ) on Wednesday March 04, 2026 @09:26AM (#66022124)

    Get them out of your code.

    • It is interesting though that Copilot is not the best coding assistant out there. You'd think that with all of that code to train on, it would be better than it is.

  • OpenAI is in a fierce competitive battle. Do the executives there really think greenlighting a project to build a better revision control system (RCS) will really help their battle with Gemini and Anthropic? git is a commodity RCS in 2026. It is undisciplined to think building a slightly better RCS will move the needle they need to move.
  • So we can train AI from it.

    Stack overflow has collapsed and that's where most of the training code came from. So now the only other source would be GitHub.

    The real problem is going to be that most of the projects up there are from students and people doing it because they are trying to put something on their resume...

    As llm start devouring jobs you're going to have a hell of a lot fewer of those projects. The only thing that will be left or the hobbyists and they aren't going to generate the kin

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