11 ms·

Codeberg: a free, non-commercial GitHub alternative

159 points by passthejoe 7y ago

passthejoe 7y ago
https://codeberg.org https://codeberg.org uses the https://gitea.io https://gitea.io software for its free remote Git repository service. If you're uncomfortable with non-free software, open-core, commercial underpinnings and/or corporate ownership of Github and Gitlab, hosting your repos on Codeberg — or starting your own Gitea site — are very viable alternatives. (Edited for typos)
- richardwhiuk 7y ago
  It's difficult to see how gitea is anything other than a copyright infringement of GitHub. Compare: - https://codeberg.org/n0mad/vulkan-tests https://codeberg.org/n0mad/vulkan-tests - https://try.gitea.io/egrteg/LibreLingo https://try.gitea.io/egrteg/LibreLingo - https://github.com/kantord/LibreLingo https://github.com/kantord/LibreLingo
  - hundchenkatze 7y ago
    What are they infringing on? Site layout? There are tons of Github alternatives that all follow similar layout and styles. Gitlab, Gogs, Bitbucket...
    - apocalyptic0n3 7y ago
      Gitlab was basically a pixel-for-pixel clone in the beginning before they started differentiating themselves on features and then developed their own UI. Made it super easy to onboard new employees 5+ years ago, honestly.
  - tmalsburg2 7y ago
    Please do yourself a favor and google "copyright".
    - richardwhiuk 7y ago
      Look and feel is definitely copyrighted.
- dgreensp 7y ago
  Thanks, this was very helpful! I was scanning the prose on the Codeberg website looking to see if Codeberg itself was open source, but all it said was that it was "free" and "non-profit." Now I see that Gitea is the software (basically a clone of GitHub that is visually almost div-for-div, released with an MIT license, that you can host yourself), and Codeberg is central hosting (a "hub") running Gitea, operated as a non-profit.
  - 411111111111111 7y ago
    Gitea is a fork of gogs. Gogs is still in development as well. If people are interested, definitely check that out as well.
    - jchook 7y ago
      If you don’t need issue tracking then also check out cgit. Gitea is very slow (eg 4s GET requests) for large codebases. cgit is like lightning.
- ncmncm 7y ago
  I had developed the impression that gitea kept all the project metadata -- bug tracking, PRs, etc -- in the same repository with the project code. Was this impression correct? Looking at the "Comparison" page does not suggest anything, one way or the other. To me that would be the most important differentiator. Do any of the others do it?
  - hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
    Wait, is that something you would want? I would find it pretty awful if my git history for my code had all the other things like issues and PR metadata in it. Could potentially see it being useful if it were stored in an "auxiliary" repo that I could pull separately.
    - rkeene2 7y ago
      Fossil keeps them in the same repo but as a separate kind of object.
    - Vinnl 7y ago
      The big advantage would be that all that metadata would also be decentralised, i.e. I'd have a backup of all that on my own PC, and I could push it to a different host to automatically transfer everything, whereas e.g. GitLab has had to write custom import scripts for GitHub metadata, and you just have to hope that everything maps cleanly if you use it.
    - ncmncm 7y ago
      Of course I want it. History is history. Furthermore, why should PRs, bug reports, and build artifacts not be able to refer directly to source objects and revisions, and vice versa? A simple way to represent it might be as an ASCII dump of one or more databases representing it all, so you could roll back to any day's state; or as an update-log transcript, so you could roll back to the state after any given transaction. Both amount to successive diffs, so are reasonably compact.
      - hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
app4soft 7y ago
repo.or.cz — one more free hosting alternative to GitHub, especially for FLOSS projects.[0] [0] http://repo.or.cz/about.html http://repo.or.cz/about.html
ashishbindra 7y ago
I couldn't find any "about" page. Who owns it? Who are the people behind it?
- ericdanielski 7y ago
  https://codeberg.org/codeberg/org/src/branch/master/Imprint.md https://codeberg.org/codeberg/org/src/branch/master/Imprint....
- tmalsburg2 7y ago
  You didn't find it because you didn't look. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on "Imprint". Quote: "Codeberg is a non-profit organisation dedicated to build and maintain supporting infrastructure for the creation, collection, dissemination, and archiving of Free and Open Source Software. If you have questions, suggestions or comments, please do not hesitate to contact us at contact@codeberg.org." It's a kind of club ("eingetragener Verein" [1]) that is funded by its members and through donations. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registered_association_(Germany) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registered_association_(German...
  - hundchenkatze 7y ago
    FWIW I saw the Imprint link at the bottom, but I didn't know that's where I could find company info. However, there was a link to their mission statement in the middle of the page which includes the same info.
  - recursive 7y ago
    I think a lot of people are probably unfamiliar with any definition of "imprint" that would cause them to look there. I know I can't explain what it means in this context.
    - nutjob2 7y ago
      It comes from Impressum, essentially a form of identification for publishers, but imprint is the English word used for the German legal requirement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressum https://www.privacycompany.eu/blogpost-en/the-imprint-requirement-a-must-have-for-companies-from-outside-germany https://www.privacycompany.eu/blogpost-en/the-imprint-requir...
yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
So compared to gitlab and sourcehut (my other favorite options for free github alternatives), this is librejs complaint (sourcehut has this, don't think gitlab does), and has a github-like UI. It seems to be pushing the privacy angle and is hosted in the EU. Any other big reasons to prefer this over gitlab/sourcehut/self-hosted?
- ampdepolymerase 7y ago
  There is also OneDev: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22081419 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22081419
- darau1 7y ago
  > this is librejs complaint What does this mean/imply exactly?
  - mkl 7y ago
    It's a typo of "LibreJS compliant": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_LibreJS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_LibreJS
xeeeeeeeeeeenu 7y ago
Their half-translated UI (my browser is set to polish) is extremely off-putting. So many people seem to think that providing low quality translations is improving accessibility. It isn't. It's doing the opposite, pure english websites provide much better UX to international users. BTW, Microsoft with their automatically translated MSDN docs is by far the worst offender in this area.
- omar_elrefaei 7y ago
  > So many people seem to think that providing low quality translations is improving accessibility. It isn't. It's doing the opposite, pure english websites provide much better UX to international users. Good to know
- marten-de-vries 7y ago
  That's the case because you speak English. Think about the last time you had to navigate a website in a language you didn't speak (in my case e.g. Chinese or Russian). I remember being very happy with a few (incomplete) clues in English about were to look and what to expect. By all means, advocate for making it easy to change the language back to the original. But this stance will decrease accessibility.
  - skocznymroczny 7y ago
    In case of technical websites, you have to know English anyway, because even if there is a broken translation of the documentation, function names, enums and all the cool stuff remains in the original language anyway.
    - capableweb 7y ago
      > you have to know English anyway You don't, plenty of developers are getting around having to know English as there are other resources for learning. I think it's a dangerous assumption that everyone knows English. It's especially true in the Spanish-speaking world, where I know developers who can't have a conversation in English but are good enough to be employable.
sovok_x 7y ago
Its mobile UI is broken all over on my system. But I am all in for getting inspired by exact Github UX/UI. They're the main reason I don't want to switch to alternatives even if I hate Github after MS-merger and following "improvements of the service".
- pdimitar 7y ago
  What changes made after the MS acquisition do you dislike?
  - sovok_x 7y ago
    Personally I most dislike forced deanonymization with 2fa or annoying me with device verification which locked me out of my anonymous account with old expired email (I didn't need it secured and I don't want to prove anything to MS to restore it too). Some people also reported increasing external CI services throttling in favor of Actions, I wouldn't be surprised if they give preferential treatment to Packages too. In the end I don't want power of MS over my code and workflow to grow too much. I know they claim Github is independent but it's not really reassuring.
    - pdimitar 7y ago
      This is quite normal for an enterprise product though, and I agree on the deanonymization part. But I would not expect anonymity on such a platform anyway because GitHub is very often used in the place of a resume or a CV. Simply put, you are not the kind of user they want. Happily there are alternatives. I started backing up private repos to SourceHut.
      - sovok_x 7y ago
        I would be glad to switch, but I am sucker for good UI. I can even forgive some lost functionality for it. Most alternatives were not to my liking.
        7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
arghwhat 7y ago
See https://sourcehut.org/ https://sourcehut.org/ for a vastly different source code hosting solution. If you're interested in something other than an open source GitHub clone, then that is more likely to interest you.
- passthejoe 7y ago
  Very interesting. Thanks for the link. I will definitely be looking at this.
  - passthejoe 7y ago
    Sourcehut is very, very different. I'd like to know how this is working for devs.
    - battery_cowboy 7y ago
      I love it, I can't say bad things about it. I can't wait until the "hub" service is finished, it will allow you to combine any number of the other services into some sort of project structure. I love the builds service, too, it's really nice and easy to use. I use the todo service as my life tracker.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
        Yep, the builds service is nothing short of amazing. It's super useful to me because it lets you easily target a huge number of systems, including BSD systems that couldn't be supported through Docker or the like.
        battery_cowboy 7y ago
        They added the ability to take build artifacts now which is great. I haven't used it yet, but I plan to use it for my static gen site eventually. I'd love to be able to use my own image, though, I feel bad everytime my build script has to use 3 minutes of build server slot time to download and install a bunch of packages before it actually builds my project, if I could make a custom docker image to build in, or there was caching, it would use less time.
alucard0134 7y ago
I am curious; what does this gitea clone provide over the hundreds of other clones I could be using that are also free and non-commerical?
- ncmncm 7y ago
  https://docs.gitea.io/en-us/comparison/ https://docs.gitea.io/en-us/comparison/
- nine_k 7y ago
  I suppose it's the service, not software. Much like Github is first of all a service, a site.
- vanous 7y ago
  Great question. Let me copy/paste explanation of one of the founders: Collaboration platforms like SourceForge, GitHub, and GitLab enabled and facilitated the development and organization of free software projects. But as developers of free software we fell into a trap – we poured invaluable source code, documentation and last not least a huge and steady stream of data about our personalities, interests and social networks into proprietary platforms. These platforms are no charities, they operate to fulfill the commercial objectives of their founders and owners, outside of our control. They are valued and sold for billions of dollars. Codeberg is trying to fix that. The nonprofit Codeberg e.V. has been founded as independent non-government organization to launch and build a free home for Free and Open Source Software. Also see this short SFSCon talk: https://www.sfscon.it/talks/codeberg-a-free-home-for-free-projects/ https://www.sfscon.it/talks/codeberg-a-free-home-for-free-pr...
  - tannhaeuser 7y ago
    Thumbs up for mentioning this, and thanks for your effort. I've always found it odd (to say the least) that F/OSS projects are happily giving away their dev's and user's eyeballs and clicks to commercial entities when many F/OSS projects advertise altruistic or other ethical motives and licenses. Using github.com (or any other project hosting service) for your project's home page also ruins the web and puts all the power in the hand of very few when regular DNS and web hosting has regulated rules where providers and registrars can be negotiated with, switched, appealed, etc. Not to mention that github.com blocks indie search crawlers, adding to the search monopoly we have.
vanous 7y ago
We are missing the trees for the forest here. I think that Codeberg is not communicating their core values the best way and my understanding is: to be an open source, ethical, safe home for open source projects under Non-Profit Collaboration Community. If your repo were ever (even temporarily) disabled by a false or intentionally bullying DMCA take down request, you would know right away why every single word in the above sentence is important. And, hosted in Europe, under EU laws. This is a nice summary: https://blog.codeberg.org/codebergorg-launched.html https://blog.codeberg.org/codebergorg-launched.html Suggestions on how to make the messaging of Codebeberg clearer would be appreciated, Codeberg has an issue about this in their tracker: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/75 https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/75 Edit: added link to Codeberg issue tracker
- enriquto 7y ago
  > I think that Codeberg is not communicating their core values the best way and my understanding is: to be an open source (...) But is it? Where can you find the code for codeberg itself? Is it possible to download it all and install it locally on an air-gapped server?
  - bn7t 7y ago
    Codeberg is a customized version of gitea[0]. They have a repo[1] with the patches that are used on on codeberg. [0]: https://gitea.io https://gitea.io [1]: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/build-deploy-gitea https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/build-deploy-gitea
bashwizard 7y ago
Väry swenglish.
enriquto 7y ago
It is not clear if this is a free software project. Can it be installed locally? I see "open source" written here and there, but no link to the actual code (besides gitea).
- vanous 7y ago
  Yes it is, see here: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/build-deploy-gitea https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/build-deploy-gitea Gitea can run locally.
rijoja 7y ago
Ok, so top comment (currently) is about localisation. A really interesting topic, but has anyone tried it out yet and have opinions on the functionality?
- hjacobs 7y ago
  Yes, I'm actively using Codeberg for my OSS projects (I still have some on GitHub, too), e.g. https://codeberg.org/hjacobs/kube-web-view/ https://codeberg.org/hjacobs/kube-web-view/ Some functionality is lacking compared to GitHub, but it does what it needs to do for me.
hans_castorp 7y ago
Finally an alternative go Github and Bitbucket hosted in Europe, great.
newswasboring 7y ago
Does anyone else think Github now has a name recognition advantage? I am not a super ninja developer so I still have to make resumes, and in there I can just put github logo and a username there. Saves space and looks quite professional. I can't do that with newer services. Or am I just being over cautious here? Edit: And its not just about resumes, its the case for getting traction for your project too. I feel comfortable contributing to a project hosted on github and am sort of weary of things hosted on other places.
- passthejoe 7y ago
  Having a remote git repo monoculture where it has to be Github or nothing is unhealthy for the software ecosystem. Gitlab is a good alternative, but why not have more choices? Anybody who might want to hire you can click a link to a Codeberg/Gitea site and see what looks like a very familiar repo. It should be the project itself that is attracting users and devs, not where the git repo is remotely hosted. For free-software projects, a Gitea site like Codeberg might be an even better choice because of the conflicts involved in using a commercial entity like GitHub that uses closed-source software yet bases its entire business on a free project (Git).

159 points by passthejoe 7y ago

https://codeberg.org https://codeberg.org uses the https://gitea.io https://gitea.io software for its free remote Git repository service. If you're uncomfortable with non-free software, open-core, commercial underpinnings and/or corporate ownership of Github and Gitlab, hosting your repos on Codeberg — or starting your own Gitea site — are very viable alternatives. (Edited for typos)

richardwhiuk 7y ago
It's difficult to see how gitea is anything other than a copyright infringement of GitHub. Compare: - https://codeberg.org/n0mad/vulkan-tests https://codeberg.org/n0mad/vulkan-tests - https://try.gitea.io/egrteg/LibreLingo https://try.gitea.io/egrteg/LibreLingo - https://github.com/kantord/LibreLingo https://github.com/kantord/LibreLingo
- hundchenkatze 7y ago
  What are they infringing on? Site layout? There are tons of Github alternatives that all follow similar layout and styles. Gitlab, Gogs, Bitbucket...
  - apocalyptic0n3 7y ago
    Gitlab was basically a pixel-for-pixel clone in the beginning before they started differentiating themselves on features and then developed their own UI. Made it super easy to onboard new employees 5+ years ago, honestly.
- tmalsburg2 7y ago
  Please do yourself a favor and google "copyright".
  - richardwhiuk 7y ago
    Look and feel is definitely copyrighted.
dgreensp 7y ago
Thanks, this was very helpful! I was scanning the prose on the Codeberg website looking to see if Codeberg itself was open source, but all it said was that it was "free" and "non-profit." Now I see that Gitea is the software (basically a clone of GitHub that is visually almost div-for-div, released with an MIT license, that you can host yourself), and Codeberg is central hosting (a "hub") running Gitea, operated as a non-profit.
- 411111111111111 7y ago
  Gitea is a fork of gogs. Gogs is still in development as well. If people are interested, definitely check that out as well.
  - jchook 7y ago
    If you don’t need issue tracking then also check out cgit. Gitea is very slow (eg 4s GET requests) for large codebases. cgit is like lightning.
ncmncm 7y ago
I had developed the impression that gitea kept all the project metadata -- bug tracking, PRs, etc -- in the same repository with the project code. Was this impression correct? Looking at the "Comparison" page does not suggest anything, one way or the other. To me that would be the most important differentiator. Do any of the others do it?
- hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
  Wait, is that something you would want? I would find it pretty awful if my git history for my code had all the other things like issues and PR metadata in it. Could potentially see it being useful if it were stored in an "auxiliary" repo that I could pull separately.
  - rkeene2 7y ago
    Fossil keeps them in the same repo but as a separate kind of object.
  - Vinnl 7y ago
    The big advantage would be that all that metadata would also be decentralised, i.e. I'd have a backup of all that on my own PC, and I could push it to a different host to automatically transfer everything, whereas e.g. GitLab has had to write custom import scripts for GitHub metadata, and you just have to hope that everything maps cleanly if you use it.
  - ncmncm 7y ago
    Of course I want it. History is history. Furthermore, why should PRs, bug reports, and build artifacts not be able to refer directly to source objects and revisions, and vice versa? A simple way to represent it might be as an ASCII dump of one or more databases representing it all, so you could roll back to any day's state; or as an update-log transcript, so you could roll back to the state after any given transaction. Both amount to successive diffs, so are reasonably compact.
    - hn_throwaway_99 7y ago

app4soft 7y ago

repo.or.cz — one more free hosting alternative to GitHub, especially for FLOSS projects.[0] [0] http://repo.or.cz/about.html http://repo.or.cz/about.html

ashishbindra 7y ago

I couldn't find any "about" page. Who owns it? Who are the people behind it?

ericdanielski 7y ago
https://codeberg.org/codeberg/org/src/branch/master/Imprint.md https://codeberg.org/codeberg/org/src/branch/master/Imprint....
tmalsburg2 7y ago
You didn't find it because you didn't look. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on "Imprint". Quote: "Codeberg is a non-profit organisation dedicated to build and maintain supporting infrastructure for the creation, collection, dissemination, and archiving of Free and Open Source Software. If you have questions, suggestions or comments, please do not hesitate to contact us at contact@codeberg.org." It's a kind of club ("eingetragener Verein" [1]) that is funded by its members and through donations. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registered_association_(Germany) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registered_association_(German...
- hundchenkatze 7y ago
  FWIW I saw the Imprint link at the bottom, but I didn't know that's where I could find company info. However, there was a link to their mission statement in the middle of the page which includes the same info.
- recursive 7y ago
  I think a lot of people are probably unfamiliar with any definition of "imprint" that would cause them to look there. I know I can't explain what it means in this context.
  - nutjob2 7y ago
    It comes from Impressum, essentially a form of identification for publishers, but imprint is the English word used for the German legal requirement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressum https://www.privacycompany.eu/blogpost-en/the-imprint-requirement-a-must-have-for-companies-from-outside-germany https://www.privacycompany.eu/blogpost-en/the-imprint-requir...

yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago

So compared to gitlab and sourcehut (my other favorite options for free github alternatives), this is librejs complaint (sourcehut has this, don't think gitlab does), and has a github-like UI. It seems to be pushing the privacy angle and is hosted in the EU. Any other big reasons to prefer this over gitlab/sourcehut/self-hosted?

ampdepolymerase 7y ago
There is also OneDev: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22081419 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22081419
darau1 7y ago
> this is librejs complaint What does this mean/imply exactly?
- mkl 7y ago
  It's a typo of "LibreJS compliant": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_LibreJS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_LibreJS

xeeeeeeeeeeenu 7y ago

Their half-translated UI (my browser is set to polish) is extremely off-putting. So many people seem to think that providing low quality translations is improving accessibility. It isn't. It's doing the opposite, pure english websites provide much better UX to international users. BTW, Microsoft with their automatically translated MSDN docs is by far the worst offender in this area.

omar_elrefaei 7y ago
> So many people seem to think that providing low quality translations is improving accessibility. It isn't. It's doing the opposite, pure english websites provide much better UX to international users. Good to know
marten-de-vries 7y ago
That's the case because you speak English. Think about the last time you had to navigate a website in a language you didn't speak (in my case e.g. Chinese or Russian). I remember being very happy with a few (incomplete) clues in English about were to look and what to expect. By all means, advocate for making it easy to change the language back to the original. But this stance will decrease accessibility.
- skocznymroczny 7y ago
  In case of technical websites, you have to know English anyway, because even if there is a broken translation of the documentation, function names, enums and all the cool stuff remains in the original language anyway.
  - capableweb 7y ago
    > you have to know English anyway You don't, plenty of developers are getting around having to know English as there are other resources for learning. I think it's a dangerous assumption that everyone knows English. It's especially true in the Spanish-speaking world, where I know developers who can't have a conversation in English but are good enough to be employable.

sovok_x 7y ago

Its mobile UI is broken all over on my system. But I am all in for getting inspired by exact Github UX/UI. They're the main reason I don't want to switch to alternatives even if I hate Github after MS-merger and following "improvements of the service".

pdimitar 7y ago
What changes made after the MS acquisition do you dislike?
- sovok_x 7y ago
  Personally I most dislike forced deanonymization with 2fa or annoying me with device verification which locked me out of my anonymous account with old expired email (I didn't need it secured and I don't want to prove anything to MS to restore it too). Some people also reported increasing external CI services throttling in favor of Actions, I wouldn't be surprised if they give preferential treatment to Packages too. In the end I don't want power of MS over my code and workflow to grow too much. I know they claim Github is independent but it's not really reassuring.
  - pdimitar 7y ago
    This is quite normal for an enterprise product though, and I agree on the deanonymization part. But I would not expect anonymity on such a platform anyway because GitHub is very often used in the place of a resume or a CV. Simply put, you are not the kind of user they want. Happily there are alternatives. I started backing up private repos to SourceHut.
    - sovok_x 7y ago
      I would be glad to switch, but I am sucker for good UI. I can even forgive some lost functionality for it. Most alternatives were not to my liking.
      - 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

arghwhat 7y ago

See https://sourcehut.org/ https://sourcehut.org/ for a vastly different source code hosting solution. If you're interested in something other than an open source GitHub clone, then that is more likely to interest you.

passthejoe 7y ago
Very interesting. Thanks for the link. I will definitely be looking at this.
- passthejoe 7y ago
  Sourcehut is very, very different. I'd like to know how this is working for devs.
  - battery_cowboy 7y ago
    I love it, I can't say bad things about it. I can't wait until the "hub" service is finished, it will allow you to combine any number of the other services into some sort of project structure. I love the builds service, too, it's really nice and easy to use. I use the todo service as my life tracker.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
      Yep, the builds service is nothing short of amazing. It's super useful to me because it lets you easily target a huge number of systems, including BSD systems that couldn't be supported through Docker or the like.
      - battery_cowboy 7y ago
        They added the ability to take build artifacts now which is great. I haven't used it yet, but I plan to use it for my static gen site eventually. I'd love to be able to use my own image, though, I feel bad everytime my build script has to use 3 minutes of build server slot time to download and install a bunch of packages before it actually builds my project, if I could make a custom docker image to build in, or there was caching, it would use less time.

alucard0134 7y ago

I am curious; what does this gitea clone provide over the hundreds of other clones I could be using that are also free and non-commerical?

ncmncm 7y ago
https://docs.gitea.io/en-us/comparison/ https://docs.gitea.io/en-us/comparison/
nine_k 7y ago
I suppose it's the service, not software. Much like Github is first of all a service, a site.
vanous 7y ago
Great question. Let me copy/paste explanation of one of the founders: Collaboration platforms like SourceForge, GitHub, and GitLab enabled and facilitated the development and organization of free software projects. But as developers of free software we fell into a trap – we poured invaluable source code, documentation and last not least a huge and steady stream of data about our personalities, interests and social networks into proprietary platforms. These platforms are no charities, they operate to fulfill the commercial objectives of their founders and owners, outside of our control. They are valued and sold for billions of dollars. Codeberg is trying to fix that. The nonprofit Codeberg e.V. has been founded as independent non-government organization to launch and build a free home for Free and Open Source Software. Also see this short SFSCon talk: https://www.sfscon.it/talks/codeberg-a-free-home-for-free-projects/ https://www.sfscon.it/talks/codeberg-a-free-home-for-free-pr...
- tannhaeuser 7y ago
  Thumbs up for mentioning this, and thanks for your effort. I've always found it odd (to say the least) that F/OSS projects are happily giving away their dev's and user's eyeballs and clicks to commercial entities when many F/OSS projects advertise altruistic or other ethical motives and licenses. Using github.com (or any other project hosting service) for your project's home page also ruins the web and puts all the power in the hand of very few when regular DNS and web hosting has regulated rules where providers and registrars can be negotiated with, switched, appealed, etc. Not to mention that github.com blocks indie search crawlers, adding to the search monopoly we have.

vanous 7y ago

We are missing the trees for the forest here. I think that Codeberg is not communicating their core values the best way and my understanding is: to be an open source, ethical, safe home for open source projects under Non-Profit Collaboration Community. If your repo were ever (even temporarily) disabled by a false or intentionally bullying DMCA take down request, you would know right away why every single word in the above sentence is important. And, hosted in Europe, under EU laws. This is a nice summary: https://blog.codeberg.org/codebergorg-launched.html https://blog.codeberg.org/codebergorg-launched.html Suggestions on how to make the messaging of Codebeberg clearer would be appreciated, Codeberg has an issue about this in their tracker: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/75 https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/75 Edit: added link to Codeberg issue tracker

enriquto 7y ago
> I think that Codeberg is not communicating their core values the best way and my understanding is: to be an open source (...) But is it? Where can you find the code for codeberg itself? Is it possible to download it all and install it locally on an air-gapped server?
- bn7t 7y ago
  Codeberg is a customized version of gitea[0]. They have a repo[1] with the patches that are used on on codeberg. [0]: https://gitea.io https://gitea.io [1]: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/build-deploy-gitea https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/build-deploy-gitea

bashwizard 7y ago

Väry swenglish.

enriquto 7y ago

It is not clear if this is a free software project. Can it be installed locally? I see "open source" written here and there, but no link to the actual code (besides gitea).

vanous 7y ago
Yes it is, see here: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/build-deploy-gitea https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/build-deploy-gitea Gitea can run locally.

rijoja 7y ago

Ok, so top comment (currently) is about localisation. A really interesting topic, but has anyone tried it out yet and have opinions on the functionality?

hjacobs 7y ago
Yes, I'm actively using Codeberg for my OSS projects (I still have some on GitHub, too), e.g. https://codeberg.org/hjacobs/kube-web-view/ https://codeberg.org/hjacobs/kube-web-view/ Some functionality is lacking compared to GitHub, but it does what it needs to do for me.

hans_castorp 7y ago

Finally an alternative go Github and Bitbucket hosted in Europe, great.

newswasboring 7y ago

Does anyone else think Github now has a name recognition advantage? I am not a super ninja developer so I still have to make resumes, and in there I can just put github logo and a username there. Saves space and looks quite professional. I can't do that with newer services. Or am I just being over cautious here? Edit: And its not just about resumes, its the case for getting traction for your project too. I feel comfortable contributing to a project hosted on github and am sort of weary of things hosted on other places.

passthejoe 7y ago
Having a remote git repo monoculture where it has to be Github or nothing is unhealthy for the software ecosystem. Gitlab is a good alternative, but why not have more choices? Anybody who might want to hire you can click a link to a Codeberg/Gitea site and see what looks like a very familiar repo. It should be the project itself that is attracting users and devs, not where the git repo is remotely hosted. For free-software projects, a Gitea site like Codeberg might be an even better choice because of the conflicts involved in using a commercial entity like GitHub that uses closed-source software yet bases its entire business on a free project (Git).