The argument seems bad for the reason that if you take it to the limit it's self defeating. Moving to GitHub because it's cheap right now and is popular at som

The argument seems bad for the reason that if you take it to the limit it's self defeating. Moving to GitHub because it's cheap right now and is popular at some point results in even more GitHub dominance which then translates into higher costs as they have market power. Running your own Gitlab instance or your own instance of anything really is by definition more upfront expensive but also a hedge against future costs. Cloud deployment is one example of it. There's been a pretty significant move back to on premise because that's the exact dynamic that played out. If there's a French cultural element to it it's not "people in France can't calculate costs", which is both patronizing and obviously stupid, it's that the French have a healthy skepticism of outsourcing their infrastructure to people whose decisions they have no control over.