Moving to 'lightgbm-org/LightGBM'

[jameslamb]

Description

In March 2026, LightGBM moved GitHub organizations, from Microsoft/LightGBM to lightgbm-org/LightGBM.

This issue describes those changes.

Why Now?

Microsoft's Open Source Conduct Team contacted the LightGBM maintainers and suggested that they were considering archiving Microsoft/LightGBM.

They gave us the opportunity to move the repository to a different organization before that happened, and we took it.

Expected Impact

The impact of this change on LightGBM was not expected to be large.

GitHub's documentation on transferring repositories (link) said the following:

When you transfer a repository, its issues, pull requests, wiki, stars, and watchers are also transferred. If the transferred repository contains webhooks, services, secrets, or deploy keys, they will remain associated after the transfer is complete. Git information about commits, including contributions, is preserved.

Many things were left unchanged:

• still MIT-licensed, with Microsoft as one of the copyright holders on all code
• SWIG package still placed Java bindings in the com.microsoft.ml.lightgbm namespace (no plan to change this)
• all other distribution names and links for first-party packages left unchanged:
  • NuGet packages: https://www.nuget.org/packages/lightgbm/
  • Python packages: https://pypi.org/project/lightgbm/
  • R packages on CRAN: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/lightgbm/index.html
• no expected changes to third-party repackaging (e.g. conda-forge, Homebrew, MacPorts)

Other Benefits of Moving

There were some additional benefits to the project from moving:

• maintainers gained full control over security-relevant settings, including:
  • repo collaborator list (including role assignment)
  • branch protections
  • app integrations
• clarified the status of the project as an open-source project and not a paid product of a for-profit company

Costs / Risks of Moving

There were also some additional costs from moving:

• having to pay for some non-free-tier CI resources (like GitHub-hosted GPU runners) ourselves
• maintenance burden of the organization (billing, app integrations, other org settings)
• needing to establish identity as an authoritative source (i.e. explaining that this is the official LightGBM project, not a fork)

Thank You

Note

Please comment below if you're aware of any effects of this change not already discussed here. We will be happy to help.
Thank you for using LightGBM!