Title is from Linus Torvald’s quote
What is Firefox VCS? Is that mercurial? Then it is about time. I know the OSS people whinge about GitHub but you can self host your own git if you want.
It is important for open source projects to go where the contributors are and for better or worse that’s GitHub right now now.
I do realize which community this is in as well, that isn’t lost on me. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The move GitHub is not the best but the move to git opens the door to a ton of other tooling and advantages over mercurial.
A quick web search revealed that Mozilla started moving from hg to got about two years ago. I couldn’t find anything about why GitHub though. Having too many contributors can be a real burden so maybe its some cost saving move?
It’s just like the time they left the fediverse and shut down their instance.
Here are the actual details. Seems like they used to support Git and Mercurial, which is of course ridiculous in 2025.
Moving to pure Git & Github is a great move that will lower the barrier to contribution significantly. Well… it would have anyway except
- We will continue to use Bugzilla, moz-phab, Phabricator, and Lando
- Although we’ll be hosting the repository on GitHub, our contribution workflow will remain unchanged and we will not be accepting Pull Requests at this time
Shame. I guess it is a ton more work to migrate those, and Github’s offerings are a fair bit more basic than e.g. Phabricator and presumably Lando (e.g. I found out Github’s merge queue forces you to pick between squashing and merging all PRs in the same way). Bugzilla is trash though.
Not surprised in the least. Getting millions from Google, using Microsoft infrastructure, next it’ll probably be revealed that they are exclusively working on Macs and running Linux in a VM for testing.
Getting off github is almost as easy as standing up your own instance, though. Git is well designed to avoid serious vendor lock-in
