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> Our mission is to support the creation and development of Free Software; therefore we only allow repos licensed under an OSI/FSF-approved license. For more de

> Our mission is to support the creation and development of Free Software; therefore we only allow repos licensed under an OSI/FSF-approved license. For more details see Licensing article. However, we sometimes tolerate repositories that aren't perfectly licensed and focus on spreading awareness on the topic of improper FLOSS licensing and its issues. If you aren't doing FOSS software and aren't "tolerated" you aren't allowed here. This is not an alternative to Github.

anonzzzies 4y ago
Exactly.
mort96 4y ago
It's an alternative to GitHub for the FOSS hosting use-case.
throwawaaarrgh 4y ago
It is an alternative, in the same way Vegan food is an alternative to meats.
- goodrubyist 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - jackothy 4y ago
    Why is his point juvenile? I enjoyed the comparison. Going FOSS only/going vegan can be challenging and limiting, but is arguably the most ethical choice. In the abstract, I see many similarities between the FSF/Codeberg philosophy and vegan philosophy.
    - kelnos 4y ago
      It's juvenile because the obvious implication is that making this choice is unnecessarily limiting, and only someone willing to cut off their nose to spite their face would do it. (Maybe my biases are showing, though, and I'm reading too much into that.) Regardless, the analogy only runs skin-deep. There is precious little you have to "give up" if you stop using proprietary software. (Ok, ok, gaming probably takes a big hit, but that's about it.) If you become vegan, you give up the vast majority of dishes you might find in the diets of most cultures around the world. (You even lose quite a bit from cultures that are largely vegetarian.) And the alternatives are just not the same, at least not yet. For many pieces of software, the open source alternative is comparable, or even superior.
      - virgildotcodes 4y ago
        Someone trying to convince others that FOSS alternatives are just as good does sounds just like a vegan trying to convince meat eaters that vegan alternatives are just as good. Sure, in some cases it can be pretty decent, but it’s undeniable that it is similarly “unnecessarily” limiting. Ask main stream users if they prefer photoshop vs gimp, macOS vs Linux, foss video games vs Fortnite/COD/Minecraft, libera chat vs discord, mastodon vs twitter, etc etc.
    - ComposedPattern 4y ago
      Yeah, as a vegan who shuns proprietary software, I think this is a great analogy. It works regardless of which side you're on. In both cases, GP would probably say "that's way too restrictive," but I'd say "get over it, some things are more important than convenience."
commoner 4y ago
Services don't need to handle every single use case to be viable alternatives. GitHub does host proprietary software, but it is most well known for being a place to collaborate on free and open source software. Codeberg addresses this primary use case in a more focused way than GitHub intends to, and because of this, Codeberg is an excellent alternative to GitHub.
- allioeddie 4y ago
  This sort of myopic, self-important, holier-than-thou perspective is why the open source community is so rarely successful in anything it tries to do for itself. Whatever you think Github's most known or most useful featureset is, the fact of the matter is it dominates because they don't draw philosophical lines in the sand and exclude people as a result. It's a big tent, all are welcome, and as a result, it has near universal coverage in the industry, so there's no burden to ask users to sign up or familiarize themselves with the platform in order to contribute. Everyone already has a GH account, and a lot of the driver of that is the private repositories that they host for business. Of the people I've worked with, fewer than 10% of them have ever made a single FOSS contribution, but they all have Github accounts. I don't want to learn a different UI for contributing to FOSS than the one I use for my daily work. I frankly do not care about the ethos of FOSS enough, neither do almost any developers, relative to the field, however overrepresented FOSS awareness is on HackerNews. I contribute back to open source when it's convenient - and not too expensive - to do so; making it _less_ convenient so the host can draw an arbitrary philosophical line in the sand is going to serve no purpose but to decrease contributions. FOSS maintainers need to understand that the FOSS ethical and philosophical perspective is not universal - it is, in fact, quite rare in the industry. They need to understand that contributions and use are driven by utility and convenience and economics, not morality. Sacrificing anything utility-wise or convenience-wise for philosophy is just shooting themselves in the foot.
  - mort96 4y ago
    Wow, entitled much? Nobody owes you anything, nobody is obliged to host your code. If you want to use the same UI for your closed/work projects and your FOSS projects, you can host your own instance; Forgejo is FOSS. Codeberg seems to be focused at providing a free service to the FOSS community, _and that's okay_. You don't get to be mad at that.
bilqis 4y ago
That is factually true, because github allows non-free and/or proprietary licenses.
croes 4y ago
Not an alternative for everybody
- internetter 4y ago
  So what?
Proven 4y ago
[dead]
glitchc 4y ago
Is this really worth throwing a hissy fit over? The OSI list alone is quite broad [1]. I see many licenses there that do not restrict inclusion of code in commercial products. [1] https://opensource.org/licenses/ https://opensource.org/licenses/
- 2h 4y ago
  Is this a joke? OSI essentially means only "corporate friendly" licenses are allowed. If someone wants to protect their work under a non-commercial license, they can do that on GitHub but not CodeBerg.
  - LambdaComplex 4y ago
    > OSI essentially means only "corporate friendly" licenses are allowed The GPL and AGPL are both on the list that you're replying to.
    - 2h 4y ago
      Those both allow commercial use, so you just proved my point.
      - juunpp 4y ago
        Considering how corporations are often allergic to the GPL variants, you can consider them non-commercial for most practical purposes.
        2h 3y ago
        every single license here allows commercial use: https://choosealicense.com/appendix https://choosealicense.com/appendix so I will defer to that over your opinion.
  - glitchc 4y ago
    Note that Codeberg supports both FSF and OSI licenses. I listed just the OSI ones in response to the OP's claim that their stance somehow prohibits commercial access to source code listed on their site. FSF licenses are listed here [2]. Goodness, FOSS seems to stir some strong emotions on HN. [2] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html
djha-skin 4y ago
Codeberg runs on Forjego, the soft fork of Gitea. If you don't like the restrictions of Codeberg, running your own copy of it is super easy and relatively cheap. Further, they are working on a fediverse feature allowing PRs between instances. If this happens, your individual instance can PR with Codeberg, but still have private repos. I'm excited about this.
- hnarn 4y ago
  It's "Forgejo" (as in a forge), not "Forjego". I personally don't think it's a great name as this confusion perhaps proves. Anyway, I had no idea about the plans to interface with ActivityPub, that is really cool.
usea 4y ago
Not even public domain or CC0 is allowed. Your license absolutely must restrict the rights of others to be permissible.
- commoner 4y ago
  That's not true. Codeberg hosts public domain and CC0 projects. According to the Codeberg docs:[1] > For documentation, writing, and other non-code assets, a Creative Commons (CC) licence can be used, but note that only the following CC licences are considered free (sorted from protective to unconditional): > - CC-BY-SA > - CC-BY > - CC0 > Like CC themselves, Codeberg recommends against using a CC licence on code.[2] CC0 is classified by the FSF under "Free licenses, compatible with the GNU GPL", so Codeberg definitely accepts CC0 projects.[3] Also, licenses such as the Unlicense (which is approved by both the FSF and the OSI) make it easy to dedicate code to the public domain with a legal fallback for jurisdictions that do not recognize the public domain.[4] Public domain repos exist on Codeberg, for example: - https://codeberg.org/streams/streams https://codeberg.org/streams/streams (public domain declaration) - https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep (CC0) - https://codeberg.org/youngchief/feddy https://codeberg.org/youngchief/feddy (Unlicense) --- [1] https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/licensing/ https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/licensing/ [2] https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-commons-license-to-software https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-comm... [3] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html [4] https://unlicense.org https://unlicense.org
Matl 4y ago
I hate how on Hacker News it's always the corporate, proprietary, market that is cast as the underdog. You know the one who get all the press coverage and has VC money behind it.
- skrtskrt 4y ago
  hacker news sees creating a company and tearing up regulations as the ultimate form of altruism and bravery add in a side of guzzling right wing talking points from a fire hose and claiming to be a philosopher-economist and you've got a nice front page post discussion
  - classified 4y ago
    And don't forget the saving-the-world heroics.
  - bingobango123 4y ago
    [flagged]
- kelnos 4y ago
  What do you expect for a site created originally to support communication and community among startup founders? YC from the very start was an archetype of the SV startup ethos: be economically subversive, disrupt the mainstream corporate choices, engage in capitalism at its fullest, all so you can take the place of and become the huge corporation you set out to compete with. To many people in this world, startup founders are the underdog. But they seem to forget that, at some point in their growth, they stop being the underdog and instead become the incumbent. Unfortunately, this mindset often taints the attitudes of people who post here. The term "hacker" used to be primarily associated with counter-culture types, those lower on the corporate totem pole, but more recently it's also come to be associated with people who "hack" capitalism and become financially, economically, and career-track successful.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
lrvick 4y ago
I moved all my company repos to Codeberg because unlike Github it has proper support for git signature enforcement, and I can self host whenever I want for free so I am not locked in because the platform itself is open source. No one can censor me because I can put it on my own domain any time with modest effort. 100% of all repos I have as a company other than some internal documentation are FLOSS. I am of the strong opinion closed source software should not exist, and you can be a very successful and well paid software engineer spending the majority of your time working on open source software if you care enough to pursue that path. Maybe you do not make quite as much money when you dial the greed down a bit, but you contribute to building a society with better collaboration and faster progress that will benefit us all. We should build open source community around open source projects and tools where we can fix issues ourselves instead of hoping a central for profit company will do it for us. IMO the only projects that should stay on Github are ones that believe centralized dictatorships like Microsoft are best equipped to govern software development.

anonzzzies 4y ago

Exactly.

mort96 4y ago

It's an alternative to GitHub for the FOSS hosting use-case.

throwawaaarrgh 4y ago

It is an alternative, in the same way Vegan food is an alternative to meats.

goodrubyist 4y ago
[flagged]
- jackothy 4y ago
  Why is his point juvenile? I enjoyed the comparison. Going FOSS only/going vegan can be challenging and limiting, but is arguably the most ethical choice. In the abstract, I see many similarities between the FSF/Codeberg philosophy and vegan philosophy.
  - kelnos 4y ago
    It's juvenile because the obvious implication is that making this choice is unnecessarily limiting, and only someone willing to cut off their nose to spite their face would do it. (Maybe my biases are showing, though, and I'm reading too much into that.) Regardless, the analogy only runs skin-deep. There is precious little you have to "give up" if you stop using proprietary software. (Ok, ok, gaming probably takes a big hit, but that's about it.) If you become vegan, you give up the vast majority of dishes you might find in the diets of most cultures around the world. (You even lose quite a bit from cultures that are largely vegetarian.) And the alternatives are just not the same, at least not yet. For many pieces of software, the open source alternative is comparable, or even superior.
    - virgildotcodes 4y ago
      Someone trying to convince others that FOSS alternatives are just as good does sounds just like a vegan trying to convince meat eaters that vegan alternatives are just as good. Sure, in some cases it can be pretty decent, but it’s undeniable that it is similarly “unnecessarily” limiting. Ask main stream users if they prefer photoshop vs gimp, macOS vs Linux, foss video games vs Fortnite/COD/Minecraft, libera chat vs discord, mastodon vs twitter, etc etc.
  - ComposedPattern 4y ago
    Yeah, as a vegan who shuns proprietary software, I think this is a great analogy. It works regardless of which side you're on. In both cases, GP would probably say "that's way too restrictive," but I'd say "get over it, some things are more important than convenience."

commoner 4y ago

Services don't need to handle every single use case to be viable alternatives. GitHub does host proprietary software, but it is most well known for being a place to collaborate on free and open source software. Codeberg addresses this primary use case in a more focused way than GitHub intends to, and because of this, Codeberg is an excellent alternative to GitHub.

allioeddie 4y ago
This sort of myopic, self-important, holier-than-thou perspective is why the open source community is so rarely successful in anything it tries to do for itself. Whatever you think Github's most known or most useful featureset is, the fact of the matter is it dominates because they don't draw philosophical lines in the sand and exclude people as a result. It's a big tent, all are welcome, and as a result, it has near universal coverage in the industry, so there's no burden to ask users to sign up or familiarize themselves with the platform in order to contribute. Everyone already has a GH account, and a lot of the driver of that is the private repositories that they host for business. Of the people I've worked with, fewer than 10% of them have ever made a single FOSS contribution, but they all have Github accounts. I don't want to learn a different UI for contributing to FOSS than the one I use for my daily work. I frankly do not care about the ethos of FOSS enough, neither do almost any developers, relative to the field, however overrepresented FOSS awareness is on HackerNews. I contribute back to open source when it's convenient - and not too expensive - to do so; making it _less_ convenient so the host can draw an arbitrary philosophical line in the sand is going to serve no purpose but to decrease contributions. FOSS maintainers need to understand that the FOSS ethical and philosophical perspective is not universal - it is, in fact, quite rare in the industry. They need to understand that contributions and use are driven by utility and convenience and economics, not morality. Sacrificing anything utility-wise or convenience-wise for philosophy is just shooting themselves in the foot.
- mort96 4y ago
  Wow, entitled much? Nobody owes you anything, nobody is obliged to host your code. If you want to use the same UI for your closed/work projects and your FOSS projects, you can host your own instance; Forgejo is FOSS. Codeberg seems to be focused at providing a free service to the FOSS community, _and that's okay_. You don't get to be mad at that.

bilqis 4y ago

That is factually true, because github allows non-free and/or proprietary licenses.

croes 4y ago

Not an alternative for everybody

internetter 4y ago
So what?

Proven 4y ago

[dead]

glitchc 4y ago

Is this really worth throwing a hissy fit over? The OSI list alone is quite broad [1]. I see many licenses there that do not restrict inclusion of code in commercial products. [1] https://opensource.org/licenses/ https://opensource.org/licenses/

2h 4y ago
Is this a joke? OSI essentially means only "corporate friendly" licenses are allowed. If someone wants to protect their work under a non-commercial license, they can do that on GitHub but not CodeBerg.
- LambdaComplex 4y ago
  > OSI essentially means only "corporate friendly" licenses are allowed The GPL and AGPL are both on the list that you're replying to.
  - 2h 4y ago
    Those both allow commercial use, so you just proved my point.
    - juunpp 4y ago
      Considering how corporations are often allergic to the GPL variants, you can consider them non-commercial for most practical purposes.
      - 2h 3y ago
        every single license here allows commercial use: https://choosealicense.com/appendix https://choosealicense.com/appendix so I will defer to that over your opinion.
- glitchc 4y ago
  Note that Codeberg supports both FSF and OSI licenses. I listed just the OSI ones in response to the OP's claim that their stance somehow prohibits commercial access to source code listed on their site. FSF licenses are listed here [2]. Goodness, FOSS seems to stir some strong emotions on HN. [2] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html

djha-skin 4y ago

Codeberg runs on Forjego, the soft fork of Gitea. If you don't like the restrictions of Codeberg, running your own copy of it is super easy and relatively cheap. Further, they are working on a fediverse feature allowing PRs between instances. If this happens, your individual instance can PR with Codeberg, but still have private repos. I'm excited about this.

hnarn 4y ago
It's "Forgejo" (as in a forge), not "Forjego". I personally don't think it's a great name as this confusion perhaps proves. Anyway, I had no idea about the plans to interface with ActivityPub, that is really cool.

usea 4y ago

Not even public domain or CC0 is allowed. Your license absolutely must restrict the rights of others to be permissible.

commoner 4y ago
That's not true. Codeberg hosts public domain and CC0 projects. According to the Codeberg docs:[1] > For documentation, writing, and other non-code assets, a Creative Commons (CC) licence can be used, but note that only the following CC licences are considered free (sorted from protective to unconditional): > - CC-BY-SA > - CC-BY > - CC0 > Like CC themselves, Codeberg recommends against using a CC licence on code.[2] CC0 is classified by the FSF under "Free licenses, compatible with the GNU GPL", so Codeberg definitely accepts CC0 projects.[3] Also, licenses such as the Unlicense (which is approved by both the FSF and the OSI) make it easy to dedicate code to the public domain with a legal fallback for jurisdictions that do not recognize the public domain.[4] Public domain repos exist on Codeberg, for example: - https://codeberg.org/streams/streams https://codeberg.org/streams/streams (public domain declaration) - https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep (CC0) - https://codeberg.org/youngchief/feddy https://codeberg.org/youngchief/feddy (Unlicense) --- [1] https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/licensing/ https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/licensing/ [2] https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-commons-license-to-software https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-comm... [3] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html [4] https://unlicense.org https://unlicense.org

Matl 4y ago

I hate how on Hacker News it's always the corporate, proprietary, market that is cast as the underdog. You know the one who get all the press coverage and has VC money behind it.

skrtskrt 4y ago
hacker news sees creating a company and tearing up regulations as the ultimate form of altruism and bravery add in a side of guzzling right wing talking points from a fire hose and claiming to be a philosopher-economist and you've got a nice front page post discussion
- classified 4y ago
  And don't forget the saving-the-world heroics.
- bingobango123 4y ago
  [flagged]
kelnos 4y ago
What do you expect for a site created originally to support communication and community among startup founders? YC from the very start was an archetype of the SV startup ethos: be economically subversive, disrupt the mainstream corporate choices, engage in capitalism at its fullest, all so you can take the place of and become the huge corporation you set out to compete with. To many people in this world, startup founders are the underdog. But they seem to forget that, at some point in their growth, they stop being the underdog and instead become the incumbent. Unfortunately, this mindset often taints the attitudes of people who post here. The term "hacker" used to be primarily associated with counter-culture types, those lower on the corporate totem pole, but more recently it's also come to be associated with people who "hack" capitalism and become financially, economically, and career-track successful.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

lrvick 4y ago

I moved all my company repos to Codeberg because unlike Github it has proper support for git signature enforcement, and I can self host whenever I want for free so I am not locked in because the platform itself is open source. No one can censor me because I can put it on my own domain any time with modest effort. 100% of all repos I have as a company other than some internal documentation are FLOSS. I am of the strong opinion closed source software should not exist, and you can be a very successful and well paid software engineer spending the majority of your time working on open source software if you care enough to pursue that path. Maybe you do not make quite as much money when you dial the greed down a bit, but you contribute to building a society with better collaboration and faster progress that will benefit us all. We should build open source community around open source projects and tools where we can fix issues ourselves instead of hoping a central for profit company will do it for us. IMO the only projects that should stay on Github are ones that believe centralized dictatorships like Microsoft are best equipped to govern software development.