Technology
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What the author is probably searching for is "vendor-lockin", which is an anticompetitive practice for so long that it became the way many companies rely their business on. It favors established products over new-comers by making switching offerings difficult/expensive or even impossible, thus better products often have no chance of competing in a field, that was dominated by a single supplier for a while.
IMO there should be strict regulations and high fines associated with it, because it hinders innovation massively across all industries.
The cost of switching away from github for a project is high, but not as high as in other fields.
Imo github doesnt have that high of a vendor lock-in. Its git, you can clone and push it to another server. Sure, youll have to convert the ci's and templates, but thats about it really.
And a good yaml is easily converted as the ideas and actions are the same, only the action names are different.
But yes, i think that is what the author was getting at.
It has more than you expect, if your project is established on github and want to move away you have to deal with:
All of those issues would arise if you wanted to migrate an established project to Github as well.
Well the reason for that is the vendor-lockin and centralized technology.
If your project for instance uses a similar development method as the linux kernel does, e.g. sending and reviewing patches via mailing lists and providing url to push and pull git repos from, it is quite easy to switch out the software stack underneath, because your are dealing with quasi-standart data: Mbox, SMTP, HTTP(s) and DNS. So you can move your whole community to a different software stack by just changing some DNS entries and maybe provide some url rewrite rules without disrupting the development process.
I am not saying that the mailing list development process is the right one for every project, but it demonstrates how agnostic to the software stack it could be.
If vendor-lockin is made illegal, the service providers would have more incentives to use or create standardized APIs, so that their product can be replaced by competitors. So switching to or from github/gitlab/... becomes easier.