The organization behind the Zig programming language moved its project from GitHub to Codeberg after its leadership publicly criticized the reliability and direction of GitHub's developer services. Foundation president Andrew Kelly, who also leads Zig's development, said the nonprofit hosting alternative offered a better home for the project.
Kelly's central complaint concerned GitHub Actions, the service used to run automated software-building and testing jobs. He argued that unresolved defects had made the system unpredictable and sometimes prevented even commits to Zig's main branch from being checked. He also connected that deterioration to GitHub's increased emphasis on artificial intelligence, though GitHub did not provide a comment in the cited report.
One example involved a script intended to pause an Actions runner safely. A GitHub discussion opened in April 2025 described rare cases in which the script never stopped. Zig core developer Matthew Lugg explained that the loop could continue indefinitely if a heavily loaded machine missed the single second in which its condition would succeed. In Zig's infrastructure, he said, several instances consumed processor time for hundreds of hours and silently disrupted two runner services for weeks.
The underlying code dated to February 2022. A correction associated with a separate issue from February 2024 was merged on August 20, 2025, but the April discussion stayed open until December 1. The report also said another defect involving processor usage had yet to be resolved. That sequence helped turn a technical reliability problem into a wider dispute about maintenance and engineering priorities.
The departure was not presented as an isolated protest. The Dillo browser's creator, Rodrigo Arias Mallo, likewise said he intended to leave GitHub, citing concerns that included usability, moderation, dependence on JavaScript, service access and the company's focus on generative AI. Codeberg, meanwhile, had increased its supporting membership from more than 600 at the start of 2025 to more than 1,200 by late November.
Kelly later apologized for the inflammatory tone of his original post, but the relocation remained a concrete decision. For Zig contributors, the immediate consequence was a change in the infrastructure used to host and coordinate development. More broadly, the episode showed how persistent failures in continuous-integration tooling can affect whether open-source projects continue to trust a dominant platform.
The dispute also highlighted the cost of failures that appear small in source code but become serious under heavy automation. A pause routine that spins continuously can waste computing capacity, while a stuck runner can delay unrelated checks behind it. Zig's account linked those effects directly to its own machines. The move to Codeberg therefore responded to experienced disruption, not merely disagreement over GitHub's corporate messaging.
