Not if youre Joe Chinese Dev wanting to collaborate with an OSS project hosted on Github. "Hey, can you guys move everything to this service that doesn't block China so I can send you push requests/issues/etc" is probably going to go nowhere.
Sure they can. You find a dev working on that project and say "Hey, can you make your git repository public so I can push some commits to you?" As far as git (not GitHub) is concerned, every local copy of the repository is just as much the "true" one as the one hosted on GitHub, and you can push commits to any of them, which will get merged in when a GitHub committer pushes to GitHub's remote.
I was doing some analytics on various crypto projects on GitHub, and was surprised by the number of them that had authors without GitHub accounts. These show up in the commit API as having 'author' and/or 'committer' as null (the commit itself has an author that's whatever you set your "git config user.name/email", which may not be a registered GitHub user). You have to handle these cases or your analytics script will crash very soon, because it's a pretty common case.
Sure, if a project insists on staying on github. But a lack of github does not mean you can't cooperate. You only miss the extra features that github adds. Which are certainly nice, but not essential to use git effectively.
They can use git. They can use mailing lists. They can use carrier pigeons to exchange pull requests. That's not what the concern is about.
If the OSS project says that all collaboration work has to happen on their Github projects, and Github's forced to block China - then Chinese devs would no longer able to collaborate.
They would need someone outside China to be willing to take their pull request/log an issue/etc.
Sure, but that's not the issue I'm addressing here. If a project insists on github no matter what, and github gets blocked, and the project keeps insisting on github, obviously that's a problem. Nobody is denying that. It's obvious.
My point is to underscore the point of the ancestor of this thread: that you (the project) don't need github. You can use all the strength of git without github.
It will be possible to create a bridge bot, between e.g. GitLab and GitHub, through their API to synchronize PRs, issues, commits, etc automatically. So this particular problem is solvable.
Not if youre Joe Chinese Dev wanting to collaborate with an OSS project hosted on Github. "Hey, can you guys move everything to this service that doesn't block China so I can send you push requests/issues/etc" is probably going to go nowhere.