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.
You can both be right. The title as it stands describes Codeberg as a "Fast Open Source Alternative to GitHub" and I'd agree that it's a confusing title to say the least.
What we're really talking about here is a free-as-in-beer SaaS service that primarily caters to open source software repositories. This isn't clear in the title, because "Open Source" in this context can be read both as the back-end itself being open source (which it is), or more correctly -- but much less obviously -- that it's an alternative for open source repositories compared to GitHub.
Codeberg uses Forgejo[1] which in turn is a soft fork of Gitea[2], and anyone can use these two projects to self-host their proprietary codebase -- but the title for this post in no way makes it clear what Codeberg actually is.
One could literally just take the first thing you see on their website and it would be a much better description:
> Codeberg is a collaboration platform and Git hosting for free and open source software, content and projects.
It's only a great alternative if you believe GitHub deserves to die because it hosts everyone and making proprietary software should be made as difficult as possible. Which is the same as being against people making a living from building and selling software. ie you are against the existence of programming as a profession. In specifically that case this is superior to GitHub.
> It's only a great alternative if you believe GitHub deserves to die
Geez, why so extreme? They choose whom they support for free, and they choose FLOSS projects with similar goals/philosophies. If your project has a different philosophy, fine, up to you, but it's not something they want to spend their time to support for free. You are welcome to go somewhere else, including going to or staying at GitHub.
Nobody wants anything "to die". It's about providing alternatives for people who are not entirely happy. If you are, fine, nobody forces you to anything. Just like you can't force the Codeberg people to provide something to you for free which they are not comfortable with.
You ask 'why so extreme'. What mostly riles me up about some 'foss movement' people is the fact that some of them think they're morally superior. In cases like the poster I replied to it seemed obvious and I point out what his ethics actually mean in the end. Perhaps it will make him think.
Honestly, it never works to get people to listen to what you have to say if you do it in a self-righteous, condescending, and abrasive manner. They just write you off as a jerk and it reinforces their belief that people who don't agree with them are unpleasant.
You could almost certainly pay to host non-open source projects on Codeberg. It happens to be that the price is unlisted, though (and it's probably higher than what you or anyone else would want to spend, anyway).
I don't understand the purpose of this comment. It strikes me as a nonsequitur. How does it conform to the logical throughline of the previous two comments?
Github is a great alternative to Codeberg. It is for people who have no problem having a corporation use your code to train a neural network to spit verbatim copies of its inputs stripped of a license. Which is the same as being against people making a living from building and selling software, i.e. you are against the existence of programming as a profession.
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.
What if your goal is not being successful in term of absolute number of users no matter what but instead to promote something?
It's fortunate that sometimes people refuse to build big tents and instead push for a better world.
> They need to understand that contributions and use are driven by utility and convenience and economics, not morality
You are wrong. GNU's whole existence is for moral reasons, and their tools are pervasive and you "typically" depend on them. It might not be everybody, even most people, but it's still a thing.
> I frankly do not care about the ethos of FOSS enough
You need to understand that some people do, and will promote it.
> I don't want to learn a different UI for contributing to FOSS
And I don't like to have to use proprietary software to contribute to FOSS [1].
How do we do? Do we please you and go for GitHub, or do we work towards this goal?
I personally won't optimize for convenience no matter what. Convenience is killing our planet. We actually need to take our fingers out to make the world work. We can't live forever effortless. This is the pragmatic path, actually. I'm not arguing against convenience, I'm the first to like it, but things have various aspects worth taking in account, convenience only being one of them.
Not that I don't find Forgejo not convenient. Pretty much the opposite. I like its UX.
>It's fortunate that sometimes people refuse to build big tents and instead push for a better world.
In general I prefer if people keep their politics out of IT infrastructure. We don't all agree on what makes the world better and what makes it worse.
That said, I don't have a problem with this particular project. It's absolutely fine to create a git hosting solution specifically for open source as open source is itself a very big tent spanning a wide range of ideologies and groups that are otherwise hostile towards each other.
It is in fact commercial closed source software that is increasingly subject to political restrictions that are justified by supposedly making the world a better place.
> I prefer if people keep their politics out of IT infrastructure.
I find it interesting that people only ever say this when talking about free software initiatives. Nobody moans about software getting 'political' when talking about closed-source companies enforcing intellectual property laws that were literally written by politicians.
> I prefer if people keep their politics out of IT infrastructure.
>> I find it interesting that people only ever say this when talking about free software initiatives. Nobody moans about software getting 'political' when talking about closed-source companies enforcing intellectual property laws that were literally written by politicians.
I'm sorry, but I find your extremely selective quoting offensive. You are distorting the meaning of my comment, in fact turning it into its exact opposite. You even left out the first two words of the sentence you are quoting just to make your point.
I said "In general I prefer..." followed by two paragraphs justifying why I think that this general principle doesn't apply to open source and to this project in particular.
If your 'general principle' doesn't apply to the most important and popular software in the world (open source) then perhaps it is not very general, and not very principled.
My general principle is that political opinions as well as political conflicts and fault lines should not determine access to IT infrastructures.
Now, open source licences themselves as well as distribution platforms such as public git repositories guarantee access to some very important global IT infrastructures.
Perhaps you can see why my general principle cannot apply to open source in the same way it applies to other things that fall under "their politics" - the rather sloppy term I originally used.
It's the same reason why the principle of tolerance cannot apply to tolerance itself in the same way it applies elsewhere.
I think principles are always contradictory in the absolute. They only make sense as directions along specific dimensions and can rarely be applied to themselves.
> My general principle is that political opinions as well as political conflicts and fault lines should not determine access to IT infrastructures.
Then you're going to be disappointed, because politics is intrinsically intertwined with software and IT infrastructure. The fact that so much IT infra is built on top of open source and free software means that discussion is inescapable.
The fact that corporations need to track the licensing of the software they use (both for proprietary and open source software) is enough proof of that.
Regardless of what you said in your later paragraphs, statements of the form "I prefer to keep politics out of X" are often naive, as is the case here. Unfortunately, politics is everywhere, and ignoring that only serves to ignore important aspects of reality that can affect outcomes you care about.
Politics is a part of IT infrastructure, full stop. Ignoring that won't make it go away. The discussion on this post is proof of that.
> In general I prefer if people keep their politics out of IT infrastructure
You need to make choices that will have tradeoffs anyway. Unless you find a consensual choice, which is very rare, you might be picking mainstream ones, which are not neutral.
Neutrality does not exist. For instance, for any software you need to choose, it will be either proprietary or open source. Both have political implications.
I agree that some choices cannot be avoided, but others can and should be avoided.
In my opinion, we should avoid linking the use of IT infrastructures to political issues such as systems of government, wars, climate change, gender identity, religion or anything else that is unrelated to the technical aspects of that infrastructure.
Open source licences themselves are a good example of how I think it should be done. They do not impose any unnecessary political restrictions. They only impose specific rules related to source code. I think that's a good idea and we should apply this idea to other IT infrastructures as well.
What makes IT infrastructures special compared to anything else that we should avoid political matters?
For me they are critical and omnipresent. So crucial, in fact, that they are somewhat at the center of political matters nowadays. They are probably a core part of many policies.
And I believe the way they are done cannot avoid politics.
Trying hard to project into myself into your perspective, I'm trying to compare them to roads, which are infrastructure too. You could say they should be neutral and let anybody use them without discrimination...
... but they are not neutral. The way they are built consume more or less energy, have various environmental implications, they more or less encourage usage of cars or trains or planes depending on how the network is organized, how they are maintained, which facilities are nearby roads… And many roads are not very usable without cars so they actually discriminate.
I believe the same kind of things apply to IT infrastructure. Most choices will have political implications and therefore you'd actually be careful when designing them.
Now, regardless of whether IT infrastructure can be kept neutral (which I don't think is possible), I actually think that we should not and that we'd better work hard to leverage, and design them the best we can to limit our environmental footprint (for instance).
I already conceded that it is not possible to avoid all politics. There are political decisions to be made that are directly related to the infrastructures themselves, their functioning, their economics, their accessibility, the power structures they enable, etc. I did not mean to exclude these political aspects.
What I meant very specifically is that access to IT infrastructures in the widest sense of the word (including source code) should not be restricted based on political opinions or fault lines.
Going further, I would not even restrict access to criminals as long as the criminality is not related to the functioning of the infrastructure itself. I believe that such restrictions would threaten the infrastructures themselves, make them worse for everybody or at least cause unacceptable levels of collateral damage.
I agree that absolute neutrality doesn't exist. But throwing out the whole concept of neutrality just because neutrality has its limits would be a bad idea. E.g., network neutrality has a very specific meaning. It doesn't mean that networks can be neutral in absolutely every way.
You cannot remove politics from IT infrastructure. Politics is everywhere. Politics is deciding how we live together as a society; the very fact we're having this discussion is politics.
It's the fable of being apolitical that is a mistake, because in doing so you are strengthening the status quo and prevent others from thinking about the situation and changing it.
I agree that nothing is completely free of politics. What I'm advocating is to tolerate a wider spectrum of political opinions regarding access to IT infrastructure than we may be willing to tolerate in other contexts.
I believe that this stance can be justified on a technical level that is only very remotely linked to the main political ideologies of our time.
> In general I prefer if people keep their politics out of IT infrastructure.
Fine, then go somewhere else and don't use Codeberg. Your criticism is part of bringing politics into this. It's about freedom and choice. You have the choice to go somewhere else, nobody is forcing you.
Quoting myself: "That said, I don't have a problem with this particular project. It's absolutely fine to create a git hosting solution specifically for open source..."
What I mean by "keep out" is that I don't want political opinions or fault lines to determine access to IT infrastructures.
I worry that this is where we're headed, but as I said, hosting open source git repositories is not that and I have no problem with it whatsoever.
I think we can and should be neutral with regard to _some_ distinctions in _some_ specific contexts. That's not the same as saying there is a neutral position in general.
You haven't explained why drawing a philosophical line is somehow "self-important" and "holier-than-thou perspective". They are targetting like minded people which is their prerogative, if that doesn't appeal to you then that's too bad. But when you say this moral stand is why they won't ever have market reach like Github, you are presuming that they even want that (maybe because of the implicit assumption that everyone do want that). But a cursory look at their landing page shows they are a non-profit and do not want market share or your "contribution" if it's not coming from right place. Your rant assumes they don't understand the economics, but clearly they do - they just don't care. But why is that shooting themselves in the foot?
To be a bit more cynical, Github alternatives are a dime a dozen. It's not clear to me that their market segmentation is hurting them. It seems to me that it's the only thing that's putting them on the map, otherwise they would just be a drop in the ocean.
> I don't want to learn a different UI for contributing to FOSS than the one I use for my daily work.
Codeberg is an instance of the FOSS forge platform Forgejo, which is a fork of Gitea. As FOSS projects, Forgejo and Gitea can be used to host any kind of software, proprietary or open source, without restriction. It is entirely possible for a person to use Forgejo/Gitea to contribute to both work projects and off-work projects, even if the work projects are proprietary.
If your employer chooses to use GitHub instead of Forgejo/Gitea, nobody else is obligated to stick with GitHub to make it more convenient for you to contribute. FOSS projects may choose Codeberg for its other advantages, such as its superior privacy policy and the fact that Codeberg does not automatically resell content from its hosted repositories as a proprietary service (like GitHub does with Copilot).
I don't know how deep copilot delves, and if it has access to all repos, but I am not comfortable with that. I am not even comfortable with a major player such as MS having access to intellectual gold.
I didn't say that Codeberg's superior privacy policy had anything to do with Copilot. My sentence was listing two separate examples of reasons why a FOSS project would pick Codeberg over GitHub. The differences between Codeberg's and GitHub's approaches to privacy are obvious.
From Codeberg's privacy policy:[1]
> We have a minimum-collection policy. Aside from essential data required to keep the service running, we are not collecting additional user or tracking data.
From GitHub's privacy policy:[2]
> We allow third parties to use analytics cookies to understand how you use our websites so we can make them better. For example, cookies are used to gather information about the pages you visit and how many clicks you need to accomplish a task. We also use some analytics cookies to provide personalized advertising.
> GitHub and third parties use social media cookies to show you ads and content based on your social media profiles and activity on GitHub’s websites. This ensures that the ads and content you see on our websites and on social media will better reflect your interests. This also enables third parties to develop and improve their products, which they may use on websites that are not owned or operated by GitHub.
> In addition, GitHub and third parties use advertising cookies to show you new ads based on ads you've already seen. Cookies also track which ads you click or purchases you make after clicking an ad. This is done both for payment purposes and to show you ads that are more relevant to you. For example, cookies are used to detect when you click an ad and to show you ads based on your social media interests and website browsing history.
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.
The title of this HN post doesn't reflect that, Codeberg itself is clear about that though. Instead it should be "Codeberg - Fast Open Source Github Alternative for FOSS projects"
People are entitled to reactions to ads. This is an ad.. this is one reaction.
Parent will not use.. I'm guessing you won't use them over github. If 1% readership uses them I would be shocked. 99% of the people commenting won't use them.
Now you are saying people can't express themselves because nothing is owed. For every ad watched a comment is owed by the watcher. That's owed.
Sir when someone on their own volition shares a service they find useful, that's not an ad. It's an ad if Codeberg is in any way involved. Do we have a reason to believe they are? Nothing in this Oblio user's page suggest any involvement with Codeberg.
This is a common misconception. We don't need to do anything. We build things on our terms, and set policies how we see fit. If that increases friction so that people like you decide not to contribute, that's a shame, but that's a trade off we're willing to make.
And regardless of all that, advocating for a single platform for anything (whether proprietary or open source) is just a bad idea. GitHub does have a lot of things going for it, but it's a single point of failure, run by an entity that can decide to change the terms of the service in any way it pleases. We might hope and assume they won't do anything destructive (since most destructive things would be detrimental to themselves as well), but stranger things happen.
At any rate, your complaint is fairly specious: Platforms like Gitea (which Codeberg uses) and GitLab are similar enough to GitHub that the usage flow for third-party contributions is pretty similar and requires virtually no effort to learn. (In fact, Gitea and GitLab have been criticized in the past for copying GitHub too much.) Sure, if you were going to use a Gitea- or GitLab-based provider to host your own stuff, you'd have to learn quite a bit more if you were coming from GitHub. But just making a contribution isn't much of a hurdle to jump: the main hurdle is having to create yet another account, though many Gitea and GitLab instances allow you to sign in using OAuth and your GitHub credentials.
It's fine that you don't feel the desire to make principled stands on things like this, but it's unfair of you to talk down so harshly on those of us who do. I'm sure you have some causes that are important to you that I don't share, but I wouldn't criticize you for those, or for how you decide to spend your spare time.
> the open source community is so rarely successful in anything it tries to do for itself.
Strongly disagree. Given how hard decentralized collaboration seems to be in general, I'm amazed at what has been achieved. Imagine the internet and associated buisnesses without open source software.
> 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
If the goal is to share code, between just BSD Unix and Linux, open source would be incredibly successful. When you look at languages, development tools, databases and networking, a lot of FOSS has been very successful.
> 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.
The people who authored Codeberg have an agenda and are very direct about it. It is their property, and their right to do what they are doing... just as it is your right to vocalize you don't like it.
> I don't want to learn a different UI for contributing to FOSS than the one I use for my daily work.
Ok. Fair enough. I think I said roughly the same thing about git back when everything was CVS and Subversion.
> They need to understand that contributions and use are driven by utility and convenience and economics, not morality.
I make code all day. Some of the things I make have little monetary value to me or my company but might help others. It's not about morality, its just me doing what I want to do with my time and skills. I've made friends, built companies, and got way more out of FOSS than I've ever contributed to FOSS.
> Sacrificing anything utility-wise or convenience-wise for philosophy is just shooting themselves in the foot.
I think you are missing a very big point. Sharing with others isn't a "philosophy" it is an economic transaction... an exchange of value.
I read the Copilot terms, they only use public repos for AI training. Private repos are not used for training. I've since privated all of my non-forked repos.
