Consider sinking capital or asking for donations for your own CI then - sure you might get something for "free", but if you aren't paying anything then you might just be the product.
Serious downsides to being the product include:
* No means of production - whatever profit you hoped to have can simply be taken away from you.
* No control over your likeness, IP
* Limited legal protections
* Finding yourself being sold in ways you find unethical.
I'd reconsider your planned move, unless I guess you really just don't care about your project longevity...
GitHub's just a tool to me. I can put my project any number of places, including my own server, any time I want. Why would I pay for compute ("means of production") or contend with a lower limit when I can get it for free from GitHub?
I don't know what you mean by "taken away from you" or "control over likeness" or even "legal protections". Code is intangible, it can be multiple places. If you're referring to Copilot, my code can already be taken whether I use GitHub as my base of operations or not, because it is public and GitHub feels the thing is "fair use"...
You throw around big words that apply to other industries, but what specifically do you think I lose with software?
Tools are not made all equal, and there's this fallacy that just because it is a tool it is probably OK and as easy to use as abuse.
To borrow from the medical industry - yes, opiate drugs are absolutely useful _in specific cases of extreme acute pain_, but that doesn't make them good tools for dealing with a headache.
A tool can be bad, even if it can be used well, likewise a tool can be good even if it can be used for bad.
"Code is intangible, it can be multiple places" - you should study law, especially wrt existing legal precedents. If this were true, things like software patents would not be a problem, and I would evaluate how much you really can lay claim to your code, especially now Microsoft has played their hand here...
In a world where digital media and electronics remain an important part of every industry, and large rich tech companies exist, these are absolutely concerns, this is not some idle ideological patter. Your IP matters, (F)OSS has IP as well, that's part of why any of this matters.
Serious downsides to being the product include: * No means of production - whatever profit you hoped to have can simply be taken away from you. * No control over your likeness, IP * Limited legal protections * Finding yourself being sold in ways you find unethical.
I'd reconsider your planned move, unless I guess you really just don't care about your project longevity...