I am unhappy with GitHub. It’s not because of any technical issues of the service, I’ve had no complaints there. I am unhappy with their company culture, and how they treated Julie Ann Horvath.
I want to state unequivocally that I fully support Horvath in this. Given the severe yet fully expected backlash that Horvath and other women commenting publicly on the situation received, it should be obvious that she had nothing to gain by speaking out.
This and previous events at GitHub, such as the meritocracy rug incident, have caused me to lose my trust in GitHub as an ethical company that treats its employees well.
GitHub finally released a relatively substantive report yesterday that went into more detail about their investigation. I must commend CEO Chris Wanstrath for finally admitting what they did wrong in how they handled the issue, and for mentioning the specific problems they did find.
However.
I'm still not convinced the investigation was comprehensive and unbiased. As Horvath said:
I'm pretty satisfied with @Defunkt's blog post. I disagree about the objectiveness of the "investigation," as well as the toxic workplace.
— Julie Ann Horvath (@nrrrdcore) April 28, 2014Trust is easily lost, but hard won. GitHub has lost my trust, and it will take more than a well-worded blog post to restore that trust. I hope that Wanstrath follows through on everything he says, I sincerely do, but I cannot simply take him at his word at this point in time. Restoring trust takes time. If the actions of Wanstrath and the company in the following months back up these words, then I seriously will consider returning. Until then, I cannot support GitHub.
As of today, I am canceling my paid subscription to GitHub and transferring all of my personal projects to my own GitLab instance hosted on Digital Ocean, the same cloud provider I use to host this blog. I will retain a presence on GitHub with a free account for collaboration with other projects on GitHub, but I will be minimizing my usage on GitHub to the fullest extent possible.
You can now find my projects at https://gitlab.theoreticalideations.com/public/projects. Pull requests, issues, and comments are more than welcome, but I will be working on a Code of Conduct for the site that will be strictly enforced.
P.S. I am going with my own hosted solution instead of BitBucket because they have had their own problems in the past. I refer you to the Culture Offset Pledge for more information.
Update: I have decided to move back to GitHub, for the reasons outlined in this blog post. I will be shutting down my GitLab instance soon.