According to theregister, the Zig Software Foundation announced the migration of its projects to the non-profit code hosting service Codeberg due to frustration with GitHub's deteriorating service quality, sparking widespread doubts in the open-source community about GitHub's engineering capabilities.
Trigger: A Critical Bug Not Fixed for Three Years
The incident originated from a bug titled "safe_sleep.sh script hangs indefinitely." In February 2022, GitHub replaced the posix "sleep" command with the "safe_sleep" script, which had a clear flaw — if a process was not scheduled within a one-second interval, the script would enter an infinite loop, consuming 100% CPU continuously.
Zig core developer Matthew Lugg pointed out in an error report in April 2025: "This situation is easy to occur on CI servers with extremely high loads. Once it happens, the consequences are very serious: it completely destroys a runner until manual intervention. On our Zig CI runner servers, we observed multiple such processes running for hundreds of hours, silently causing two runner servers to go offline for weeks."
Although the issue was formally reported in April 2025, GitHub did not merge the fix until August 20th, and never responded in the original discussion thread, which was finally closed on December 1st. More ironically, the fix was proposed as early as February 2024, but remained unreviewed for over a year and was even automatically closed by a GitHub bot in March 2025.
Zig Founder Criticizes GitHub: "Embrace AI or Get Out"
Zig Software Foundation Chair and Chief Developer Andrew Kelly was blunt when announcing the migration: "GitHub Actions has unforgivable flaws, which have been completely ignored. The CEO of GitHub once said 'embrace AI or get out,' it seems Microsoft's lackeys understood the meaning, because GitHub Actions started 'random scheduling' — seemingly randomly choosing tasks to run. Combined with other flaws and the inability to manually intervene, this caused our continuous integration system to be severely backed up, making it impossible to even check commits to the main branch."
Kelly later apologized for the "incendiary post," but the decision of the Zig Foundation to migrate remained unchanged.
Open-Source Community Responds: GitHub Is Declining
Jeremy Howard, co-founder of Answer.AI and Fast.AI, stated on social media: "The way this bug was implemented was obvious, and anyone could see at a glance that it would consume 100% CPU indefinitely and continue running unless the task happened to check the time at the right moment. I really can't understand how a series of astonishing and unbelievable events could happen in a normally functioning organization."
Zig is not the only project leaving GitHub. Rodrigo Arias Mallo, creator of the Dillo browser project, also announced last weekend his plan to leave GitHub, citing reasons including excessive reliance on JavaScript, declining usability, insufficient moderation tools, and "overemphasis on LLMs and generative AI, which are destroying the open web."
Codeberg Benefits: Membership Doubles
Since the beginning of this year, the number of supporting members on the non-profit code hosting platform Codeberg has doubled from more than 600 to over 1,200 last week.
In contrast, GitHub has not disclosed the current total number of paying users. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, mentioned at the Q3 2025 earnings call that "GitHub Copilot users exceed 15 million, with growth of more than four times year-over-year," but did not specify how many users paid for Copilot or other services. In the fourth quarter of 2024, GitHub's annual revenue run rate was $2 billion, with GitHub Copilot subscription revenue accounting for about 40% of the annual growth.
As of the time of this article, GitHub has not responded to this matter.
