What really stands out to me in this migration story isn't the technical side at all, but the reminder that "feature parity" isn't the real hurdle here. Codeberg is already good enough for most day to day workflows; what it doesn't have is the gravitational pull GitHub built through network effects, integrations, and plain old inertia.
This is partially being addressed by projects like https://tangled.org. It's built on the same protocol as bluesky, meaning your identity is preserved across different platforms so that _where_ your git is hosted is unrelated to how you discover and connect with others.
Unfortunately it's most ActivityPub-oriented, right? Which means no name portability. That's a major shortcoming compared to an AT protocol-based thing like Tangled appears to be.
I don't tend to believe in cryptokey-first protocols like Nostr, where your identity is tightly coupled to a keypair. Human identity doesn't work like that at all, and keypairs as the basis of identity will never be suitable for use by the masses.
Human-readable names are far more suitable as a handle for identity as humans think of it. And DNS names are an okay-ish implementation of that.
I think that a decentralized protocol that provides name portability based on the DNS is a far better protocol than one that relies on keypairs.
AT being backed by VC is false—it's Bluesky the company that is. AT is merely a spec for signing, storing and propagating structured data (records) + the identity that owns said records.
If only we could use something like a gpg key as our identity. Maybe if it had a mechanism to share and revoke keys, upgrade them, cross-sign them with others to develop some sort of like trust system that was web-like. I bet we could like build a whole infrastructure around it to maintain developer identities in a completely decentralized way.
And just sheer amount of documentation and examples out there. Everyone uses it, therefore everyone writes about it, the new hire probably knows it, and if they don't they can find it easily.
Then again maybe for stuff like actions and in general CI/CD it's not all that bad, you don't need whole team to know exactly how to write it, you just need to have a person knowing it. and it's generally not all that hard to learn.
This is why CI should be separate from code repository storage and that should be separate from your collaboration tools. They all can speak git if you want.
> This is why CI should be separate from code repository storage
Maybe, but for any complex project you get stuck with dependencies between various code branches and various CI repo branches anyway, so I’m not sure how much easier it really is to manage that complexity rather than just putting the CI code in your repo so that the CI dependencies are explicit.
It feels like a <game theory> problem (Tragedy of the commons? First mover? I dunno them well enough). It’s probably a mistake for any one company to not pick GitHub, because it’s likely a higher friction distraction from what the actual goals are of the company. But enough companies paying that price ultimately would benefit everyone by fuelling stronger competition.
My primary pain point with Codeberg has been that the issue search is worse, so that there are cases where I'm rather certain than issue exists-- because I've triaged it in the past-- but it's hard to find with the keyboard search. Hopefully that can be improved soon.
There were some times were Codeberg's general performance was noticeably worse, but most recently it has been fine.
If you thinking of migrating a project with hundreds of issues, I would do a test migration and practice a few different searches to test the result quality.
Codeberg is a fork of Gitea, itself a fork of Gogs.
Both forks originated for "philosophical" reasons, not technical ones and Joe Chen (@unknwon on GH) deserves a lot of the merit for building a clean forge in Go mostly by himself.
How long do you think until the inevitable community split into the Codeberg People's Front and the People's Front of Codeberg over some minor ideological disagreement?
But I'm sort of disappointed the end result doesn't seem like it's any better for users? (not blaming the author)
The benefits for the maintainer are also mostly philosophical... Which is a shame
I just tried Codeberg
- I get constant "Making sure you're not a bot!" anime girls
- The login with Github is hidden behind a minuscule drop down arrow. Seemingly intentionally obscured.. either have the option clearly, or don't have it at all..
- the format is identical to github with zero improvements to layout. It still has the README at the bottom, where you have to scroll past a billion files to even see what the project is about. Ex: https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot Why not just make the README the landing page, and then the file tree a separate tab? Or some horizontal side-by-side layout
Blindly copying the market leader and offering nothing new .. just doesn't seem like a winning strategy? It either indicates a lack of imagination or initiative. This space has some very clear room for improvements..
Following leader's GUI is not a choice, I feel like you never did such endeavor as building an alternative to a well-known software in it's way to enshitification : people will ask and complain if the alternative is too far from their comfort zone.
The good part is that if you have better solution you actually can suggest a PR and/or implement it for yourself.
The bot verification is not specific to Forgejo/Codeberg a lot of Foss project and organization use this method to avoid unnecessary bot traffic. I understand the issue you have with it but the problem is way larger than codeberg here.
Also about the login with GitHub button would be immensely annoying for the community : you came from GitHub and you might think that your experience is more important but as this is community driven and not a business the people actually creating and using the software don't need nor want to prioritize such button but leave the option for those who wants it, which is very nice of them. Eventually if the majority start thinking a GitHub login is preferred an issue can be created and a change made in that direction.
Both of the issues you listed are what I call "helpful problems", issues with a service that is helpful insofar as they immediately tell you there are probably a lot more issues under the surface.
Are there any alternatives to Github that offer similar bang for the buck? Particularly for very small teams or solo devs that need private repos? The author here specifically mentions Codeberg, which seems like it's just for FOSS projects.
You can self host the software underlying Codeberg, which is Forgejo. Then there is also GitLab which has a lot more features but is arguably more intensive to maintain. And then there is the long tail, such as the projects Forgejo was forged from (Gitea and Gogs) and various other FOSS forges e.g. Phorge which was forked from the now discontinued Phabricator.
That’s interesting. I would have said the opposite. I’ve never used any of the social features, but the technical aspects (including integrations) are where the value is.
It does break and go down; and GHA are a real pain in the ass. But the basic hosting and PR workflow are fine.
The PR workflow is fine if you don’t care about stacked PRs, you don’t write reviews, you don’t read nontrivial reviews, and you don’t need the diff viewer.
The site UI has been going downhill these years. It's become heavy and slow, and the buttons are more and more randomly placed. Like after you search for something in the repo, to go back to the repo front page you needed to click on the most unexpected button.
It's still getting things done, for sure, but no longer pleasant to work with.
I think Github has a nice UI.....when the contents finishes loading.
That's the real problem with Github these days. Too much critical information behind throbbers that take their sweet time. I find Codeberg much more responsive, despite being an ocean away and having the occasional anti-AI-scraper screen.
Some competitors like Gitlab have reduced friction by offering "Login with Github", so if you've already got a Github account, the bar for signing up some alternative forges is low.
I help with one of the most popular projects on Codeberg, Fuzzel. I can say we get no shortage of issues and feature requests from being on an alternative forge. Indeed, we have plenty!
Stick with Github if it solves your problem. No particular reason to move off, only reasons I've seen so far is "don't like Microsoft" and "Don't like the UI". But overall, GitHub is the leading tech in this space. For FOSS, I can see why some may want to move off, but for commercial work, it's great. Seems to be a bit of a bandwagon of articles of people moving off hitting hackernews (which in reality represents a tiny percentage of users), no need to hop on the bandwagon unless you have some compelling reasons for something else.
I like sourcehut. It's the only forge out there that isn't set out to copy the Github UI like everyone else. And its UI itself feels instantaneous, as if it was running locally.
The UI is fast, but it can be difficult to navigate, at least if you aren't familiar with it. In particular, unless it is explicitly mentioned in the README, it isn't at all clear how to report a bug, or submit a patch, or view relevant mailing list archives.
> In particular, unless it is explicitly mentioned in the README, it isn't at all clear how to report a bug, or submit a patch, or view relevant mailing list archives.
Those are meant to be mentioned in the README. Each of sourcehut's parts including the repo frontend, project page, mailing list, task list, documentation pages, etc are independent. There is no predefined way in which these are associated with each other like on GitHub. For example, I use a single mailing list for all of my FOSS projects.
Yes, but you are still not allowed to use them for proprietary software development. That makes it quite useless for most teams developing commercial software.
I have to interact with bitbucket on a daily basis. My advice is not just "no" but "heck no."
Bitbucket is slow to push to and pull from. From a reliability standpoint I have far more issues with Bitbucket than Github. The web UI feels completely off in a way that's hard to describe if you've never used it - it's like it was created as an afterthought or a skin on an older system, without any sort of craftsmanship behind it. There's also no source code search.
There's probably more, but quite honestly I try and stay out of the web interface of my bitbucket repos as much as humanly possible, so I shall stay happily ignorant of the rest. It's a shame, because I remember Bitbucket when it was the Github for Mercurial with a decent (if derivative) interface, and they allowed you to have private repositories without paying money.
Now, Bitbucket no longer supports Mercurial and Github gives you private repositories. Given those realities, why anybody would ever choose Bitbucket in TYOOL 2025 is beyond my ken.
Private repositories are only allowed for things required for FLOSS projects, like storing secrets, team-internal discussions or hiding projects from the public until they're ready for usage and/or contribution.
They are also allowed for really small & personal stuff like your journal, config files, ideas or notes, but explicitly not as a personal cloud or media storage.
So the ToS says only private repos that support FLOSS, but then backdoors into "small & personal stuff" which is pretty loose and up to Codeberg's discretion so probably not the best place for your private side project repos.
You're right, and after thinking about it a bit more, I think this TOS is actually more confusing than what came before. Saying explicitly that, e.g. MIT licensed software was allowed (because that license is approved by OSI), makes it unambiguous. This feels like if someone complained or had too many repos they're liable to get nuked from orbit. That being said Forgejo is FLOSS and this service is hosted for free so they're allowed to set whatever terms they want. I'll delete my upthread comment as it's misinfo.
No problem. I'm confused by it as well. I migrated a repo that is more source available than open source and didn't realize that it probably is against ToS until afterwards.
Ongoing availability issues, Microsoft's shoehorning of AI, GitHub's focus on migrating to Azure infrastructure rather than adding features and fixing shortcomings. If I had to guess.
Most people don't care about the AI being trained on their FOSS repos. If they did, they would have mass migrated when Microsoft announced it. The timing suggests that the downtime and the performance issues are definitely the irritants here.
This is not to say that people shouldn't care about AI training. I was disappointed by the public response when they announced it. The GH ToS has conditions that allow them to use your code, overriding its license. Even worse, that still applies if somebody else mirrors your code there from some other forge. And they don't stop at that. I have noticed that they just scrape off code from source registries like crates.io in the name of security. I would be surprised if they didn't use that too for training their AI.
> If you're publishing your code anywhere, it's getting trained on
citation needed. first they need to know my code exists... spend time and traffic crawling it because it's sure as hell not going to be hosted on azure... probably get detected and banned.
> It should be an assumption and thought as a malicious cybersecurity threat.
If you believe in absolute cybersecurity for anything you keep online boy I've got news for you. Literally all you can do is make it tougher but it will never be uncrackable. The degree of it depends on how much you can invest and suffer.
same here. codeberg makes in tougher so it's a measure.
I'm personally very tired of shoving AI everywhere otherwise GitHub is okay-ish albeit it seems it performed much better when it was a rails website rather than a react "app".
Not naming names but heard from contacts that it is currently a sh*t-show of politics internally right now at GitHub and no progress is being made/large parts of the platform are abandoned unless P0.
Honestly, I've been trying to cut down on the number of Microsoft development tools in my workflow because they are so drunk on the AI Kool-Aid that it's affecting the usability and reliability of their products in pretty much every other respect.
I don't really have a choice but to use Windows and Visual Studio 2022 for work, but I've dusted off my Sublime Text license and have been eyeing migrating my personal repositories to Codeberg.
I have once migrated my repositories to Codeberg, but have moved back to GitHub.
While I despise a lot of features on GitHub, Codeberg is sadly lacking the gravitational pull and visibility. I know, someone has to start, but as a single maintainer I need collaboration to keep the projects alive.
Does Codeberg provide free CI runners? I'd estimate Microsoft spends over $100m/year on free Github CI. Likely their biggest cost. It doesn't seem like a reasonable thing Codeberg to fund for free.
> Running CI/CD pipelines can use significant amounts of energy. As much as it is tempting to have green checkmarks everywhere, running the jobs costs real money and has environmental costs.
Honestly I think the mention of environmental costs has likely made users hesitant to sign up. Mentioning it costs real money is reasonable. Mentioning the environmental costs is not; the environmental harm is equivalent to the population buying a few dozen extra cars, which can easily be influenced by random marketing decisions by automakers and dealers.
In my experience reprimanding tech savvy people for the environmental costs of compute just doesn’t work. It’s far better to rephrase things into performance optimization problems, which naturally pique engineers’ interest.
You can use your own Woodpecker instance with Codeberg. I do this at work and privately and it works great and is much faster than the free CI that Codeberg can afford.
Actually, that's only for the Woodpecker instance. Forgejo Actions can be used without asking for permission, and three tiers of (Linux-only, adm64-only) free runners are provided.
Been a while since I applied, but when I did the "reasonable case" was mostly just your repo being FOSS and having a license file (+ a very vague description of what you plan to do and how much resources you'll use)
I lost what little respect I had for Codeberg when they tried to spin a teenager exploiting an opportunity to spam/troll[1] that GitHub had solved several years prior[2] into "hate campaigns from far-right forces" that "endanger free/libre software projects" so they could toot their own horn at how good they were in the face of adversity[3] (and generally have a good moan about the right-wing) instead of admitting they should've seen this coming and prevented it happening in the first place.
> Running CI/CD pipelines can use significant amounts of energy. As much as it is tempting to have green checkmarks everywhere, running the jobs costs real money and has environmental costs.
> Unlike other giant platforms, we do not encourage you to write “heavy” pipelines and charge you for the cost later. We expect you to carefully consider the costs and benefits from your pipelines and reduce CI/CD usage to a minimum amount necessary to guarantee consistent quality for your projects.
If they were genuinely just attempting to "troll" by spamming (which is a pretty lame thing to do to begin with), they wouldn't have had to use a racist slur in their message. The fact they did makes their intent pretty clear.
If a project taking a stance against people spamming the n-word makes you lose respect for them, that says a lot more about you than the project.
typedload was the most difficult because I test it on multiple versions of python, but woodpeckerCI does its job so I can still run the tests even after the migration.
For the other projects I have I didn't bother to set up a CI since it's trivial to run locally.
What really stands out to me in this migration story isn't the technical side at all, but the reminder that "feature parity" isn't the real hurdle here. Codeberg is already good enough for most day to day workflows; what it doesn't have is the gravitational pull GitHub built through network effects, integrations, and plain old inertia.
This is partially being addressed by projects like https://tangled.org. It's built on the same protocol as bluesky, meaning your identity is preserved across different platforms so that _where_ your git is hosted is unrelated to how you discover and connect with others.
FWIW, Forgejo (Codeberg) is also building federation capability [0].
[0]: https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/federation/src/branch/m...
Unfortunately it's most ActivityPub-oriented, right? Which means no name portability. That's a major shortcoming compared to an AT protocol-based thing like Tangled appears to be.
Nostr would being better. As it is truly free vs AT protocol is backed by VC.
I don't tend to believe in cryptokey-first protocols like Nostr, where your identity is tightly coupled to a keypair. Human identity doesn't work like that at all, and keypairs as the basis of identity will never be suitable for use by the masses.
Human-readable names are far more suitable as a handle for identity as humans think of it. And DNS names are an okay-ish implementation of that.
I think that a decentralized protocol that provides name portability based on the DNS is a far better protocol than one that relies on keypairs.
AT being backed by VC is false—it's Bluesky the company that is. AT is merely a spec for signing, storing and propagating structured data (records) + the identity that owns said records.
If only we could use something like a gpg key as our identity. Maybe if it had a mechanism to share and revoke keys, upgrade them, cross-sign them with others to develop some sort of like trust system that was web-like. I bet we could like build a whole infrastructure around it to maintain developer identities in a completely decentralized way.
And just sheer amount of documentation and examples out there. Everyone uses it, therefore everyone writes about it, the new hire probably knows it, and if they don't they can find it easily.
Then again maybe for stuff like actions and in general CI/CD it's not all that bad, you don't need whole team to know exactly how to write it, you just need to have a person knowing it. and it's generally not all that hard to learn.
This is why CI should be separate from code repository storage and that should be separate from your collaboration tools. They all can speak git if you want.
> This is why CI should be separate from code repository storage
Maybe, but for any complex project you get stuck with dependencies between various code branches and various CI repo branches anyway, so I’m not sure how much easier it really is to manage that complexity rather than just putting the CI code in your repo so that the CI dependencies are explicit.
It feels like a <game theory> problem (Tragedy of the commons? First mover? I dunno them well enough). It’s probably a mistake for any one company to not pick GitHub, because it’s likely a higher friction distraction from what the actual goals are of the company. But enough companies paying that price ultimately would benefit everyone by fuelling stronger competition.
Maybe a coordination problem? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordination_game
My primary pain point with Codeberg has been that the issue search is worse, so that there are cases where I'm rather certain than issue exists-- because I've triaged it in the past-- but it's hard to find with the keyboard search. Hopefully that can be improved soon.
There were some times were Codeberg's general performance was noticeably worse, but most recently it has been fine.
If you thinking of migrating a project with hundreds of issues, I would do a test migration and practice a few different searches to test the result quality.
Codeberg is a fork of Gitea, itself a fork of Gogs.
Both forks originated for "philosophical" reasons, not technical ones and Joe Chen (@unknwon on GH) deserves a lot of the merit for building a clean forge in Go mostly by himself.
How long do you think until the inevitable community split into the Codeberg People's Front and the People's Front of Codeberg over some minor ideological disagreement?
The author‘s reasons seem sensible (https://eldred.fr/blog/codeberg/)
But I'm sort of disappointed the end result doesn't seem like it's any better for users? (not blaming the author)
The benefits for the maintainer are also mostly philosophical... Which is a shame
I just tried Codeberg
- I get constant "Making sure you're not a bot!" anime girls
- The login with Github is hidden behind a minuscule drop down arrow. Seemingly intentionally obscured.. either have the option clearly, or don't have it at all..
- the format is identical to github with zero improvements to layout. It still has the README at the bottom, where you have to scroll past a billion files to even see what the project is about. Ex: https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot Why not just make the README the landing page, and then the file tree a separate tab? Or some horizontal side-by-side layout
Blindly copying the market leader and offering nothing new .. just doesn't seem like a winning strategy? It either indicates a lack of imagination or initiative. This space has some very clear room for improvements..
> I get constant "Making sure you're not a bot!" anime girls
That's Anubis:
https://anubis.techaro.lol/
There is an unbranded version available, allowing image customisation under a paid tier:
https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/admin/botstopper
The only other one I've seen deployed out there in any wide capacity is Cloudflare's.
Makes sense that Codeberg favoured an open and non-centralised solution.
Following leader's GUI is not a choice, I feel like you never did such endeavor as building an alternative to a well-known software in it's way to enshitification : people will ask and complain if the alternative is too far from their comfort zone.
The good part is that if you have better solution you actually can suggest a PR and/or implement it for yourself.
The bot verification is not specific to Forgejo/Codeberg a lot of Foss project and organization use this method to avoid unnecessary bot traffic. I understand the issue you have with it but the problem is way larger than codeberg here.
Also about the login with GitHub button would be immensely annoying for the community : you came from GitHub and you might think that your experience is more important but as this is community driven and not a business the people actually creating and using the software don't need nor want to prioritize such button but leave the option for those who wants it, which is very nice of them. Eventually if the majority start thinking a GitHub login is preferred an issue can be created and a change made in that direction.
Both of the issues you listed are what I call "helpful problems", issues with a service that is helpful insofar as they immediately tell you there are probably a lot more issues under the surface.
Are there any alternatives to Github that offer similar bang for the buck? Particularly for very small teams or solo devs that need private repos? The author here specifically mentions Codeberg, which seems like it's just for FOSS projects.
You can self host the software underlying Codeberg, which is Forgejo. Then there is also GitLab which has a lot more features but is arguably more intensive to maintain. And then there is the long tail, such as the projects Forgejo was forged from (Gitea and Gogs) and various other FOSS forges e.g. Phorge which was forked from the now discontinued Phabricator.
The point of GitHub is not technical - the website is terrible. It's the social network.
That’s interesting. I would have said the opposite. I’ve never used any of the social features, but the technical aspects (including integrations) are where the value is.
It does break and go down; and GHA are a real pain in the ass. But the basic hosting and PR workflow are fine.
The PR workflow is fine if you don’t care about stacked PRs, you don’t write reviews, you don’t read nontrivial reviews, and you don’t need the diff viewer.
You should use your IDE to do all of those things. Much better that way.
The site UI has been going downhill these years. It's become heavy and slow, and the buttons are more and more randomly placed. Like after you search for something in the repo, to go back to the repo front page you needed to click on the most unexpected button.
It's still getting things done, for sure, but no longer pleasant to work with.
I think Github has a nice UI.....when the contents finishes loading.
That's the real problem with Github these days. Too much critical information behind throbbers that take their sweet time. I find Codeberg much more responsive, despite being an ocean away and having the occasional anti-AI-scraper screen.
Some competitors like Gitlab have reduced friction by offering "Login with Github", so if you've already got a Github account, the bar for signing up some alternative forges is low.
I help with one of the most popular projects on Codeberg, Fuzzel. I can say we get no shortage of issues and feature requests from being on an alternative forge. Indeed, we have plenty!
Stick with Github if it solves your problem. No particular reason to move off, only reasons I've seen so far is "don't like Microsoft" and "Don't like the UI". But overall, GitHub is the leading tech in this space. For FOSS, I can see why some may want to move off, but for commercial work, it's great. Seems to be a bit of a bandwagon of articles of people moving off hitting hackernews (which in reality represents a tiny percentage of users), no need to hop on the bandwagon unless you have some compelling reasons for something else.
I looked into this recently. But came up with.. nothing that worked me.
I think I was looking for something like Migadu[1] for git hosting. Cheap, private and for personal use. The best option is probably to self host.
I tried to fish out some ideas with an ASK HN thread but it did not get any attention: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46011054
I have started putting my new stuff in Codeberg. Some of the private projects have manually update private mirrors on GCP (free so far).
[1] https://migadu.com/pricing/
I like sourcehut. It's the only forge out there that isn't set out to copy the Github UI like everyone else. And its UI itself feels instantaneous, as if it was running locally.
I also like it, particularly for its outstanding CI, but I don't like the patch/email-centric approach. (Gave it a try, didn't have a good time.)
The UI is fast, but it can be difficult to navigate, at least if you aren't familiar with it. In particular, unless it is explicitly mentioned in the README, it isn't at all clear how to report a bug, or submit a patch, or view relevant mailing list archives.
> In particular, unless it is explicitly mentioned in the README, it isn't at all clear how to report a bug, or submit a patch, or view relevant mailing list archives.
Those are meant to be mentioned in the README. Each of sourcehut's parts including the repo frontend, project page, mailing list, task list, documentation pages, etc are independent. There is no predefined way in which these are associated with each other like on GitHub. For example, I use a single mailing list for all of my FOSS projects.
Azure Devops, free for up to 5 users. Free runners Free private repositories Plus work item tracking
If you want bang for your buck, and you use free GitHub Actions, then no.
GitLab. There's also the option of self hosting it on a cheap server if you don't like cloud services.
Sourcehut [1] is another interesting one.
[1] https://sourcehut.org/alpha-details/
Gitlab is pretty good, plus you can self host it if you really want. It's an interesting company too, they're 100% remote.
Note that private repos are supported on Codeberg. (I would link to one of mine, but you'd just see a 404 :P)
Yes, but you are still not allowed to use them for proprietary software development. That makes it quite useless for most teams developing commercial software.
bitbucket?
Gittea for self hosting is something I always wanted to try.
I have to interact with bitbucket on a daily basis. My advice is not just "no" but "heck no."
Bitbucket is slow to push to and pull from. From a reliability standpoint I have far more issues with Bitbucket than Github. The web UI feels completely off in a way that's hard to describe if you've never used it - it's like it was created as an afterthought or a skin on an older system, without any sort of craftsmanship behind it. There's also no source code search.
There's probably more, but quite honestly I try and stay out of the web interface of my bitbucket repos as much as humanly possible, so I shall stay happily ignorant of the rest. It's a shame, because I remember Bitbucket when it was the Github for Mercurial with a decent (if derivative) interface, and they allowed you to have private repositories without paying money.
Now, Bitbucket no longer supports Mercurial and Github gives you private repositories. Given those realities, why anybody would ever choose Bitbucket in TYOOL 2025 is beyond my ken.
<s>There's nothing about Codeberg that's FOSS only afaict.</s>
This was incorrect, I misread the changes to the TOS.
Codeberg requires that the repos you host are FOSS
https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1219 Not true anymore.
From the current Terms of Service:
So the ToS says only private repos that support FLOSS, but then backdoors into "small & personal stuff" which is pretty loose and up to Codeberg's discretion so probably not the best place for your private side project repos.You're right, and after thinking about it a bit more, I think this TOS is actually more confusing than what came before. Saying explicitly that, e.g. MIT licensed software was allowed (because that license is approved by OSI), makes it unambiguous. This feels like if someone complained or had too many repos they're liable to get nuked from orbit. That being said Forgejo is FLOSS and this service is hosted for free so they're allowed to set whatever terms they want. I'll delete my upthread comment as it's misinfo.
No problem. I'm confused by it as well. I migrated a repo that is more source available than open source and didn't realize that it probably is against ToS until afterwards.
I've noticed that several projects on the front page today (and over the past few days) are migrating away from GitHub.
Is there any recent event or broader trend that explains this shift?
Ongoing availability issues, Microsoft's shoehorning of AI, GitHub's focus on migrating to Azure infrastructure rather than adding features and fixing shortcomings. If I had to guess.
... Training their own models out of your code...
Most people don't care about the AI being trained on their FOSS repos. If they did, they would have mass migrated when Microsoft announced it. The timing suggests that the downtime and the performance issues are definitely the irritants here.
This is not to say that people shouldn't care about AI training. I was disappointed by the public response when they announced it. The GH ToS has conditions that allow them to use your code, overriding its license. Even worse, that still applies if somebody else mirrors your code there from some other forge. And they don't stop at that. I have noticed that they just scrape off code from source registries like crates.io in the name of security. I would be surprised if they didn't use that too for training their AI.
If you're publishing your code anywhere, it's getting trained on. MS does not restrict themselves to only training on GH-hosted code.
Yet, not restricting themselves to train on permissively licensed code only.
The two ends of the spectrum, both source available and copyleft licensed code shouldn't be used for training, but who's listening.
The point still stands for private repos, and also not making the job easy for them.
They don't train on private repos, there has been no proof of that anyways
> If you're publishing your code anywhere, it's getting trained on
citation needed. first they need to know my code exists... spend time and traffic crawling it because it's sure as hell not going to be hosted on azure... probably get detected and banned.
No citation needed. It should be an assumption and thought as a malicious cybersecurity threat.
> It should be an assumption and thought as a malicious cybersecurity threat.
If you believe in absolute cybersecurity for anything you keep online boy I've got news for you. Literally all you can do is make it tougher but it will never be uncrackable. The degree of it depends on how much you can invest and suffer.
same here. codeberg makes in tougher so it's a measure.
Zig’s announcement[0] might provide some insight
[0] https://ziglang.org/news/migrating-from-github-to-codeberg/
I'm personally very tired of shoving AI everywhere otherwise GitHub is okay-ish albeit it seems it performed much better when it was a rails website rather than a react "app".
My guess is it's a Summer of the Shark-esque phenomenon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_the_Shark
Not naming names but heard from contacts that it is currently a sh*t-show of politics internally right now at GitHub and no progress is being made/large parts of the platform are abandoned unless P0.
Honestly, I've been trying to cut down on the number of Microsoft development tools in my workflow because they are so drunk on the AI Kool-Aid that it's affecting the usability and reliability of their products in pretty much every other respect.
I don't really have a choice but to use Windows and Visual Studio 2022 for work, but I've dusted off my Sublime Text license and have been eyeing migrating my personal repositories to Codeberg.
The new focus of GitHub is to harvest data for AI.
Everything else not important to them.
More and more people seem to be migrating away from Github. Now if only there were some Mercurial solutions among the alternatives. . .
SourceHut has Mercurial hosting: https://hg.sr.ht
I use SourceHut and I'm glad it exists but its workflows leave much to be desired.
I have once migrated my repositories to Codeberg, but have moved back to GitHub.
While I despise a lot of features on GitHub, Codeberg is sadly lacking the gravitational pull and visibility. I know, someone has to start, but as a single maintainer I need collaboration to keep the projects alive.
Does Codeberg provide free CI runners? I'd estimate Microsoft spends over $100m/year on free Github CI. Likely their biggest cost. It doesn't seem like a reasonable thing Codeberg to fund for free.
The article quotes from Codeberg,
> Running CI/CD pipelines can use significant amounts of energy. As much as it is tempting to have green checkmarks everywhere, running the jobs costs real money and has environmental costs.
Honestly I think the mention of environmental costs has likely made users hesitant to sign up. Mentioning it costs real money is reasonable. Mentioning the environmental costs is not; the environmental harm is equivalent to the population buying a few dozen extra cars, which can easily be influenced by random marketing decisions by automakers and dealers.
In my experience reprimanding tech savvy people for the environmental costs of compute just doesn’t work. It’s far better to rephrase things into performance optimization problems, which naturally pique engineers’ interest.
You can use your own Woodpecker instance with Codeberg. I do this at work and privately and it works great and is much faster than the free CI that Codeberg can afford.
They do, but their capacity is limited so you have to ask them for access and make a reasonable case.
https://docs.codeberg.org/ci/
Actually, that's only for the Woodpecker instance. Forgejo Actions can be used without asking for permission, and three tiers of (Linux-only, adm64-only) free runners are provided.
Ok, that's very interesting. Last I checked only self-hosted runners were documented, but I definitely want to look into this.
Been a while since I applied, but when I did the "reasonable case" was mostly just your repo being FOSS and having a license file (+ a very vague description of what you plan to do and how much resources you'll use)
For me this is the GitHub moat.
It isn't really a moat so much as a loss leader. Travis CI was free back in the day IIRC.
So it's a moat that trickles out to the sea and has to be kept filled very expensively.
(I'm just keeping the metaphor alive because for me it is the primary blocker, whatever we call it.)
Well if/when GH eliminates the free tier, I'll probably churn. I agree that's the main thing keeping me there.
I spent some time last week adding Forgejo/Git to my local NAS via docker and tailscale.
I lost what little respect I had for Codeberg when they tried to spin a teenager exploiting an opportunity to spam/troll[1] that GitHub had solved several years prior[2] into "hate campaigns from far-right forces" that "endanger free/libre software projects" so they could toot their own horn at how good they were in the face of adversity[3] (and generally have a good moan about the right-wing) instead of admitting they should've seen this coming and prevented it happening in the first place.
[1] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/1786
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31627061
[3] https://blog.codeberg.org/we-stay-strong-against-hate-and-ha...
> Running CI/CD pipelines can use significant amounts of energy. As much as it is tempting to have green checkmarks everywhere, running the jobs costs real money and has environmental costs.
> Unlike other giant platforms, we do not encourage you to write “heavy” pipelines and charge you for the cost later. We expect you to carefully consider the costs and benefits from your pipelines and reduce CI/CD usage to a minimum amount necessary to guarantee consistent quality for your projects.
So much pretentiousness
This seems to have been written in good spirit, addressing FLOSS maintainers.
If they were genuinely just attempting to "troll" by spamming (which is a pretty lame thing to do to begin with), they wouldn't have had to use a racist slur in their message. The fact they did makes their intent pretty clear.
If a project taking a stance against people spamming the n-word makes you lose respect for them, that says a lot more about you than the project.
[dead]
I migrated a while ago.
typedload was the most difficult because I test it on multiple versions of python, but woodpeckerCI does its job so I can still run the tests even after the migration.
For the other projects I have I didn't bother to set up a CI since it's trivial to run locally.
I've been watching and seeing a lot of movement towards tangled.sh at https://tangled.org (atproto based Git)