Because it's an advantage that it's hosted by a large company like Microsoft. There's very little chance it's going to be shut down or sold off. So developers don't need to worry about their infrastructure as much
One of our projects failed because we got caught up in infrastructure.
It's funny though how the people who are the most vocal against GitHub aren't responding to this post. But they're happy to make the biggest deal about every little button on it....
Just cause something is owned by a big company doesn't mean it'll last forever, example Google and their dead list of products.
Host gitea or forjeo if you really care about your infrastructure and data. If you can't, make some compromises and pick the next best thing. But owned by big company doesn't mean lasts forever.
Github is probably the biggest code hosting platform. There is literally no evidence that Microsoft will discontinue it.. And they've spent a huge amount of time integrating it. It also generates 1 billion in revenue, so why would Microsoft sell it? Furthermore, its free for open source..
Self hosting is part of the reason our project failed.. We wasted a lot of time with that stuff. We used Mercurial, whatever the Canonical one was, and git, and we wasted a lot of time.
Github works, and is well integrated to everything
Just pointing out that just cause its owned by a big company doesn't mean it'll last forever.
Also the FOSS community is by in large sus of Microsoft cause of their history practice of embrace, extend, extinguish. Which one would argue they embraced FOSS to gain easy access to their projects, the issues, the code, etc to train their models. Which would be OK if all code it generates has to be GPL to agree with the licenses of the collective pool of training data. Either way that's the topic of debate.
It sounds like you looked into your constraints and github works for you. That's great! And that's what's important.