Before GitHub

A personal reflection on the evolution of open source hosting from self-managed Subversion/Trac setups and SourceForge, through Bitbucket, to GitHub's dominance. GitHub transformed open source by removing friction from publishing and contributing, accidentally becoming a critical archive and trust layer for the entire software supply chain. Now, with GitHub showing signs of decline — leadership vacuum, AI noise, product churn — notable projects are migrating to alternatives like Codeberg. The author argues that decentralization may restore autonomy but risks losing the social context (issues, discussions, release history) that GitHub preserved. The core call to action: the open source community needs a publicly funded, endowment-backed archive that preserves source code, release artifacts, and project context independent of any single company's business model.