The real lock-in in GitHub is not the code, but the stars

Sometimes, a product of a company makes no money on its own, but is the underlying product that enables its other products to be sold.

Gmail

Consider the consumer Gmail service. It likely makes little money on its own. However, it is how people get introduced to Gmail. This creates demand for its paid version, Google Workspace for enterprise. That’s one reason why you probably have never heard of AWS WorkMail, Amazon’s alternative to Google Workspace.

Airlines

Consider, Delta Air Lines, its core airline business, though profitable, is small compared to its Frequent Flyer miles & associated airline status program.

In fact, the Delta Skymiles business has a bigger enterprise value that Delta Air Lines. Without the actual airline, though, the miles program would not exist.

GitHub

Now consider GitHub. For public code repositories, GitHub has become the de facto standard.

And projects have been compelled to move to GitHub. One can duplicate all technical functionality of GitHub on GitLab. However, nothing comes close to duplicating the impact of GitHub stars.

GitHub stars have value. Infact, you can even buy GitHub stars.

Now, GitHub stars have no value on their own. But ask yourself, what would differentiate a project on GitHub from GitLab if not for these stars?

So, one can complain as much about slow speed or reliability or product quality of GitHub, but leaving GitHub for a FOSS project is hard because you will be losing the social cues of your project’s importance.