Citing a “rotted” engineering culture, the Zig Software Foundation is moving its main repository to Codeberg, a non-profit hosting alternative. The migration explicitly rejects Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) strategy, which leadership claims has degraded basic service utility.
Fueling the exit is a specific “safe sleep” bug in GitHub Actions – left unfixed for months – that caused servers to hang indefinitely. The foundation is also severing financial ties, labeling its $170,000 annual revenue from GitHub Sponsors a strategic “liability.”
The Ideological Break: Rejecting the ‘AI or Get Out’ Ultimatum
Far from a sudden impulse, the decision reflects a simmering tension between open source maintainers and the corporate priorities of GitHub’s parent company. Zig Software Foundation (ZSF) President Andrew Kelley announced the immediate transfer of the project’s primary repository to the new Codeberg repository. He framed the move as a necessary defense against a platform that has lost its way.
At the center of the dispute lies a fundamental disagreement over the role of AI in software development. Friction stems from a strategic pivot articulated by former CEO Thomas Dohmke, who announced stepping down end of 2025 as gitHub joins Microsoft’s CoreAI division.
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Before his departure, Dohmke issued a directive that alienated segments of the developer community, stating that “Either you have to embrace the AI, or you get out of your career.”
Kelley interprets the subsequent degradation of basic services as a direct result of this mandate. In the migration announcement, he argues that the “lackeys at Microsoft” took Dohmke’s hint to prioritize AI features over the maintenance of core infrastructure.
Kelley contrasts the “progress” of AI tools with what he describes as “priorities and the engineering culture have rotted, leaving users inflicted with some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework in the name of progress.”
Such an ideological split has practical consequences for the Zig project, which has maintained a strict “no AI” policy for its contribution workflow. Viewing the tool as an intrusion rather than a feature, the foundation rejects GitHub’s aggressive integration of Copilot – which now accounts for 40% of the company’s revenue growth.
By moving to Codeberg, a German non-profit hosting service, Zig is attempting to decouple its operations from a roadmap it believes is hostile to traditional software engineering values.
Forensics of Neglect: The ‘Safe Sleep’ Bug
Compounding the frustration was a specific technical failure that paralyzed Zig’s continuous integration (CI) systems. In the foundation’s official announcement, Kelley detailed the operational impact of a critical flaw in GitHub Actions runners that went unaddressed for nearly eight months:
“Most importantly, Actions has inexcusable bugs while being completely neglected. After the CEO of GitHub said to ’embrace AI or get out’, it seems the lackeys at Microsoft took the hint, because GitHub Actions started ‘vibe-scheduling’; choosing jobs to run seemingly at random.”
“Combined with other bugs and inability to manually intervene, this causes our CI system to get so backed up that not even master branch commits get checked.”
Kelley’s reference to “vibe-scheduling” suggests a degradation in reliability linked to pausing new feature development for the platform’s large-scale migration to Azure. As GitHub shifted resources to support the computational demands of AI, basic job scheduling became erratic.
Engineers traced the root cause to a defect in the `safe_sleep.sh` script used by the runners. According to the ‘safe_sleep’ bug thread, which was opened in April 2025, the script contained a logic error that prevented it from terminating correctly under load. Instead of pausing execution, the process would consume 100% of the available CPU and enter an infinite loop.
Zig Core Developer Matthew Lugg noted that the flaw was not subtle. In his assessment of the code, he stated that “The bug in this ‘safe sleep’ script is obvious from looking at it… it simply spins forever.”
Operational consequences were severe. According to foundation reports, these “zombie” processes would occupy runner slots for hundreds of hours, causing the CI queue to back up for weeks. Blocking the queue, these processes prevented even critical master branch commits from being checked, effectively halting development velocity.
Despite the severity of the issue, GitHub did not prioritize a fix until the foundation made its public exit. Jeremy Howard, co-founder of Answer.AI, validated the absurdity of the situation in a series of social media posts, noting that “I can’t see how such an extraordinary collection of outright face-palming events could be made in any reasonably functioning organization.”
The Financial Calculation: Revenue as a ‘Liability’
Beyond the technical migration, Zig is undertaking a risky financial decoupling. Historically, the project has relied on GitHub Sponsors for a significant portion of its funding. A financial impact analysis estimates that the foundation received over $170,000 USD through the platform in 2024 alone.
Walking away from this revenue stream represents a gamble that the community will follow the project to a new payment processor. Kelley framed this dependency as a strategic weakness, recalling his own prediction about the platform’s trajectory. “Please just give me 5 years before everything goes to shit.”
Donors are now being directed to Every.org, a non-profit platform that aligns better with its ethos. While acknowledging the friction this introduces for supporters, Kelley was blunt about the necessity of the move. “Although GitHub Sponsors is a large fraction of Zig Software Foundation’s donation income, we consider it a liability.”
To incentivize the switch, the foundation is sunsetting perks associated with GitHub Sponsors, such as having names listed in release notes. These rewards will be transferred to the new system, but the risk of donor churn remains high. For Zig, the move signals that the cost of remaining on a platform they view as compromised outweighs the convenience of integrated monetization.
Market Context: A Fracture in the Monoculture?
Zig’s departure highlights a growing fracture in the developer tool market, where GitHub has long enjoyed near-monopolistic dominance. Owned by Microsoft, the platform currently boasts over 15 million Copilot users and an annual revenue run rate exceeding $2 billion. Its scale allows it to offer free hosting tiers that smaller competitors struggle to match.
However, a niche exodus is beginning to form among projects that prioritize software freedom and stability over AI features. Serving as another example, the Dillo Browser migration illustrates a long-standing open source project leaving for similar reasons. Codeberg reported that its supporting membership doubled in 2025, surpassing 1,200 members as developers seek alternatives.
Scaling remains a challenge for this alternative ecosystem. Codeberg struggled with “Anubis” anti-bot defense failures in August 2025, raising questions about its ability to absorb a mass migration of high-profile projects. For now, Zig is trading the stability of a hyperscaler for the ideological alignment of a community-run forge, betting that its users care more about code quality than AI assistance.