Codeberg – Fast open source alternative to GitHub | Hacker News Reader

Codeberg – Fast open source alternative to GitHub

codeberg.org

503 pointsoblio211 comments

> 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.

Exactly.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

You do if they are advertising as an alternative - that is specifically inviting comparisons.

They advertise themselves as an alternative to GitHub for FOSS projects. Nothing wrong with 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.

> 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.

> 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.

They display the code publicly for others to read. The privacy policy has no effect on companies using these repos for the next code-assist plugin

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.

[1] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/src/branch/main/PrivacyPol...

[2] https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/privacy-policies/gith...

> all are welcome

Except for those who don't want their code to be used for training proprietary AI models.

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.

Copilot should be opt-in, not opt-out.

But maybe some of us want to share our work publicly, but still not have GitHub's proprietary models trained on our code?

Right I agree, there is a class action lawsuit for exactly this reason. I believe the next court date is in May.

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.

[1] https://drewdevault.com/2022/03/29/free-software-free-infras...

>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.

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

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.

So we can arbitrarily label whatever we dislike as "political" and then demand people to "their politics out of $thing"?

That's not how it works. There are no neutral positions.

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.

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> 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.

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..."

> the open source community is so rarely successful in anything it tries to do for itself.

What are you basing this on? I use open-source tools and products everyday for work.

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.

Every animal is welcome in the "yourTheSausage"-stables, as long as its willing to put in free work and pulls that AI plow.

> 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.

Everyone is welcome at Github? Just recently Github banned a few Russian developers. Probably to comply with sanctions.

> FOSS maintainers need to...

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.

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.

If all they wanted was to be free only for OSS they could have made their priceplan that way. Now they basically forbids non-OSS.

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 pay $20 a year to develop private projects on source hut with CI and everything else included.

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?

It is.

FOSS is for free. Non-FOSS is $infinity. It's a very simple price plan.

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.

> What mostly riles me up about some 'foss movement' people is the fact that some of them think they're morally superior.

That may be so. I also don't like that. But the way to address that is not to be full of yourself yourself.

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.

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.

[1]: https://forgejo.org/

[2]: https://github.com/Codeberg-org/gitea

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

Not an alternative for everybody

So what?

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/

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.

> OSI essentially means only "corporate friendly" licenses are allowed

The GPL and AGPL are both on the list that you're replying to.

Those both allow commercial use, so you just proved my point.

Considering how corporations are often allergic to the GPL variants, you can consider them non-commercial for most practical purposes.

every single license here allows commercial use:

https://choosealicense.com/appendix

so I will defer to that over your opinion.

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

> Note that Codeberg supports both FSF and OSI licenses

those all allow commercial use. so programmers who want to prevent commercial use cannot use CodeBerg.

> 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.

Yes, use-restricted licenses aren’t Free Software. Codeberg is a non-profit that promotes Free Software. Not a joke, just out of mission.

> Yes, use-restricted licenses aren’t Free Software

people always like to come out of the woodwork in these discussion throwing around scary terms. non-commercial licenses are exactly like any other open source license, with that one restriction that it cant be used for commercial purpose. people do this for good reason, to stop companies from making huge profits off the back of free work. so use whatever fancy term you want, but the practice is not defensible.

> people always like to come out of the woodwork in these discussion throwing around scary terms.

There’s no scary terms involved here. Codeberg is a nonprofit foundation with Free software as part of its mission.

> non-commercial licenses are exactly like any other open source license,

non-commercial and other use-restricted licenses are not Open Source (OSI) or Free Software (FSF) licenses.

> people do this for good reason

And that is their right. Just as it is the right of a nonprofit organization whose entire mission is around licensing terms that are not use-restricted not to use their resources to support such software.

People oppose use-restricted licenses for good reason, too.

> There’s no scary terms involved here. Codeberg is a nonprofit foundation with Free software as part of its mission.

non-commercial licenses protect free software, just not in the pedantic meaning you are peddling.

> non-commercial and other use-restricted licenses are not Open Source (OSI) or Free Software (FSF) licenses.

looks like you cropped the rest of that sentence, so here it is again: with that one restriction that it cant be used for commercial purpose. Also if being OSI or FSF compliant, means that businesses can use my work for free, then no thank you.

> People oppose use-restricted licenses for good reason, too.

yeah, because they want software without paying for it, which they can then use to turn a profit.

> non-commercial licenses protect free software

No, they don't. Non-ommercial licenses make software broadly unusable by businessez, they don’t protect it. They typically exist to pritect the creators income from separating selling the aoftware as non-free (in even the gratis sense) for commercial users.

“No selling other software or services whose main component is the licensed software” licenses, which may be what you are thinking of, OTOH, of various forms (which are different than non-commercial licenses) protect the original software vendor from competition in selling their own software and services; they don't protect free (even gratis) software, but, like general non-commercial licenses and other proprietary licenses, thet protect the commercial interests of the software vendor.

> if being OSI or FSF compliant, means that businesses can use my work for free, then no thank you.

Sure, you are absolutely entitled under copyright law to choose a proprietary license that protects your commercial interests. When you do so, however, you aren’t entitled to the services of a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting Free (in the FSF sense) software to support your development and distribution of your non-Free software.

Kind of weird that you are so emphatic about not wanting other people to use your work for free and yet feel so entitled to other people making their work available to you for free even when your use directly opposes the purpose of their work.

> Kind of weird that you are so emphatic about not wanting other people to use your work for free

people can use my work for free, as long as the use is non-commercial. I wont respond to the rest of the sentence, because its built on an obvious strawman that I have quoted here. Good day!

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.

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.

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

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 (public domain declaration)

- https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep (CC0)

- https://codeberg.org/youngchief/feddy (Unlicense)

---

[1] https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/licensing/

[2] https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-comm...

[3] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html

[4] https://unlicense.org

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.

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

And don't forget the saving-the-world heroics.

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.

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.

People don't seem to realize the risk of centralizing on a single provider and solution. Currently, it's like 90% of the FOSS projects are hosted on GitHub. It all seems smooth and all until one day you log in to their platform and find yourself essentially shunned-off from collaborating on FOSS scene [1] .

I'm grateful Codeberg, sourcehut and other alternatives exist.

One nitpick from my experience: Codeberg's static hosting gave me way too much internal server errors (probably because they are underfunded.)

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34817163

Since you mentioned sourcehut, I’ll point out that their static hosting is excellent. I host my blog on there and have had no issues.

Not that excellent. They still don't have ipv6 support in 2023

IIRC there were issues with IPv6 on the hardware, which will be replaced once services move to Europe, and IPv6 will be available.

There should always be a mirror or archive for projects that are used, yeah. It's probably easier to archive stuff when it's centralised to one platform.

Collaborating on multiple platforms would make sense if not everyone used GitHub. It's the kind of thing that can be solved on a needed basis. As far as I know the only thing people hate about GitHub is it was proven copilot was stealing code from repos where it ignored licenses completely for collecting more training data.

Your account being banned probably does fall under incentivised interests, aka circumventing censorship. Your country can literally say ban X or we ban your platform from our country. I'm not sure why you wouldn't do such things under a burner anyway given you're also breaking laws. The expectation should be that you don't make it.

> It's probably easier to archive stuff when it's centralised to one platform.

If only all the platforms used the same protocol that allowed you to easily clone code from any of them just by changing the URL. Oh, wait…

That's true, but you don't get pull request and issues discussions from just a git clone.

Well, that's GitHub's fault for not using a standard protocol for those. The traditional GitHub way to send and discuss patches is e-mail.

We do realise, Sourceforge.

It turns out most don't care.

Monopolies are always bad. Always. And Github is a proprietary software which is nearly a monopoly for hosting free software (how ironic, isn’t it?). Exactly like sourceforge was, you are right.

Each generation must learn it the hard way.

https://ploum.net/2023-02-22-leaving-github.html

> Monopolies are always bad. Always.

I don't think that's true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_utility

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

When monopolies can rival/influence/corrupt the power that would otherwise regulate them, that is the point at which monopolies are definitely bad.

I agree with your examples, but at the same time, most public utilities and other natural monopolies, despite government regulation, still act in exploitative, anti-customer ways.

I don't think anyone would hold up a utility company as a paragon of customer-friendliness. Ditto for phone companies and ISPs.

So while it's too simplistic to just say "monopolies are bad", we still haven't found a way to have regulated monopolies that "play nicely" in the same ways companies in a competitive industry are required to do in order to stay relevant.

> When monopolies can rival/influence/corrupt the power that would otherwise regulate them, that is the point at which monopolies are definitely bad.

I would argue that there's no "when" here. This happens in all cases.

I think the subtly in the argument is that there are monopolies and alternative to monopolies and associated trade offs with those states.

So the question is: are there cases for which a monopoly has a better cost/benefit ratio than whatever the alternative is.

If you take a look at utilities, then theoretically, the upfront cost is passed on to consumers. So two different power utilities would spend twice the capital, which would then need to be passed on to consumers. Twice the repairs after a storm, twice the cost for infrastructure updates. The end state is what we see with home internet, you get a monopoly, but none of the monopoly regulation because "there's competition." Then there are mergers to watch out for, cartel behavior, etc.

So my assertion is that when you apply regulation to a monopoly it might be better than the alternatives that probably need regulation anyway.

> This happens in all cases.

This is mildly off topic, but I think it applies here. This is a statement of inevitability about what is fundamentally a political battle. If, for example, citizens united was fixed, the tax burden for people who have over 10 mil were large, and corruption was criminal and prosecuted as such, then I think it's harder to make this argument.

I think this idea of inevitability is the result of learned helplessness.

I think the idea that monopolies will always exist in a state of conflict with the citizenry is true, but I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that the monopolies will definitely win. I think they are winning right now, but I think the idea that that their victory is inevitable is self defeating.

I agree, but I also like that everything is on github because it is a single place to search. Is there a meta-search engine for github/gitlab/codeberg/bitbucket/sourceforge/etc.? It would be useful and make it less essential that everything is with one provider.

UPDATE: Before someone says "google" I'm specifically talking about a context-aware search engine that has knowledge of code-specific attributes like language/stars/etc. like github does, just across multiple repo providers

It seems to be it would help to have some sort of communication pattern, a la Mastodon and ActivityPub, such that these are all both interoperable, and as a bonus interchangeable when it comes to tooling.

https://zzollo.co/ seems to be an option that popped up after searching for a bit.

Google Code Search used to fulfill this niche, but sadly, like so many other Google products, was shut down years ago.

I agree that it's nice to have a single place to search, but IMO that convenience is vastly overshadowed by the downsides of relying on a single platform.

The flip side is economies of scale.

Github can implement code search, credential scanning, malware scanning, or any other number of other things and theoretically, every code repo can get it for free.

When everything is centralized, adding a new feature costs k but gives N benefit. When there are M different options adding a new feature costs k * M for N benefit.

I don't think it's as black and white as centralization is bad, but I do agree that it gives microsoft undue power and that power can be a force for good or evil.

> Github can implement code search

Sounds great! When are they going to do it?

Are you being sarcastic?

If not, GitHub recently updated their search feature and it's pretty good.

https://github.com/search/advanced

https://docs.github.com/en/search-github/github-code-search/...

I think it was more of a jab at GitHubs laughable search. Somehow, in 2023, GitHubs search is so fucking terrible it fails to find exact string matches in codebases.

I have a Github userscript so I just open my Github projects in SourceGraph and do my code search there.

You can put your search on "quotes" and it will look for an exact match. Github's search has improved a lot recently

I hope it's better. I've historically had searches that work best with an exact match, symbols, etc. that just DO NOT work with Haha search.

Given that most of the alternative hosting services are based on a relatively small number of platforms (GitLab, Gitea, SourceHut), I would guess it's likely they'll get advanced features like the ones you mention, at least eventually. Certainly some of the less-well-funded hosting services may not have the resources to run all these things, though.

I’m trying to migrate my personal repos from GitHub to Codeberg. The biggest challenge is to find a replacement for GitHub Actions (the free offering is so generous), and my current solution for that is to self-host an instance of Woodpecker CI [1].

I’d like to see even more diversity in Git hosting beyond “let’s all migrate from X to Y”, and for that to happen, Forgejo (the soft fork of Gitea that Codeberg runs) has already begun to implement federation [2], which can make cross-instance collaboration easier.

[1]: http://woodpecker-ci.org/ [2]: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/59

GitLab CI is pretty good.

This was on HN past week https://cicada.sh/

I'm guessing it's this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35364146 although it didn't seem to get much traction other than the one comment that matches what I found while trying to read up on it:

https://github.com/Cicada-Software/cicada/blob/main/docs/ci-...

> create a file _anywhere in your repository_ ending in .ci

uh-huh

> Note that you cannot use the pipe operator (|) with the shell command, only one command can be executed at a time

uh-huh

> To make sure that your workflow works, try pushing to your repository

so, no local runner for this, either. fantastic.

So instead of using Starlark, which a non-trivial number of folks already know, there's already editor support for, and is obviously designed to be embedded, they decided that what the world needs is another DSL. Got it.

They (Gitea) introduced actions. It is already included in the current releases, but codeberg might just not activate it. It works quite good, I actually wrote a gitea action already ("gitea-release-drafter").

Nice, perhaps is worth to invest into such kind of "fediverse" (using Codeberg with my own hosted action runners/boxes), I'd buy into that feature much faster than into any other (e.g. using Codeberg for PRs from proprietary hosted "Codeberg" instances).

There's also work on that ;) the dude doing most of the work moved to forgejo and some parts are already implemented but I'm not sure what the state is. I would also love to see federation, that's what would really be a github killer and drive this ecosystem forward imho.

- https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/18240 - https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/59

Glad to see new options. I wonder if Codeberg is going to enable actions, given that they’ve already setup an experimental instance of Woodpecker that can be requested [1] on a per-user basis.

[1]: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg-CI/request-access

SourceHut[1] has CI out of the box[2].

[1] https://sourcehut.org

[2] https://man.sr.ht/tutorials/getting-started-with-builds.md

About 6 months ago, Codeberg removed the repository for the Wikiless project, and IIRC did not offer any explanation to the developer for about 2 weeks.

The reason was a Wikimedia Foundation request.

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33101301

I would be very surprised if this was the case - the WMF doesn't prohibit alternative front ends in any way, and it doesn't seem to do anything they'd be upset about (unless it allowed people to evade edit blocks, but that seems incredibly doubtful); if anything, surely they'd welcome a project focused on protecting the privacy of its users?

I added the reference link:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33101301

Here's a bit more as to why: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35480811

The project also doesn't actually make clear if it's actually private and not just MITMing it's own users to track them - as has been pointed out on several[0][1] privacy focused browser extensions that haphazardly included Wikiless.

[0]: https://framagit.org/tom79/nitterizeme/-/issues/61#note_1122...

[1]: https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect/issues/232#...

Repo is still private and the dev removed all of his updates.

https://web.archive.org/web/20221125051241/https://orenom.fi...

The repo: https://codeberg.org/orenom/wikiless

There's more to this - Wikiless was an unmodified passthrough proxy that iirc just unloaded a bunch of regular mediawiki JS because the author thought it constituted a privacy violation/they were afraid that for some reason the WMF was tracking them for malicious purposes[0].

On its own, not harmful. That being said, it ran afoul of the WMFs trademarks and was actively confusing people with regular Mediawiki, which is likely what prompted the takedown. You can read the ins and outs on Wikipedias own page about mirrors and forks, there's an explanation listed there[1].

Codeberg likely complied because if you're weighting a vaguely conspiratorial-minded (the developer of Wikiless is a "feds in the walls" type if it wasn't obvious from the previous paragraph) proxy tool against possibly being shut down since you decided to stand up for an easy trademark violation, the choice is easy.

[0]: I'd like to note that as far as I can tell, no such tooling exists on Wikipedia, nor does the WMF employ the usual culprit (ad networks) of that kind of nonsense.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks/VW...

That doesn't really change anything? Taking down a repository with no explanation is unacceptable regardless of context.

It sounds like there was an explanation?

It does change things. Codeberg responded to orenom's request for explanation on the same day (see the archive link in the first source about people mentioning it was taken down) and further detailed it in the subsequent days. That's decent time to respond with an explanation if you don't have a formalized process to deal with this stuff (which given Codeberg is pretty small, seems likely).

Very few providers will shoulder the risk of being dragged to court to stand in front of you when legal is involved. Most don't have the funding to go the legal route to begin with, so they just comply. "We'll go to court for you" isn't a selling point of Codeberg, which makes it silly to expect it.

"Wikiless was an unmodified passthrough proxy, it ran afoul of trademarks and it was confusing people" doesn't change anything.

"Codeberg responded to orenom's request for explanation on the same day" does change things. You didn't include this in your previous comment from what I can see. Thanks for pointing it out.

I rely on Wikiless for making wikipedia accessible to me. It is not even about privacy, just being able to use the site without obstructions.

The whole project has been broken ever since.

Is this about the skin? If so can use the old skin (Vector 2010) if you create an account/append ?useskin=vector to the end of your URL; if not, I'm curious to hear more.

Good.

Another option which is based on gitlab: https://www.opencode.net/

It's part of https://www.opendesktop.org which is basically an open-source, free cloud services provider.

Codeberg is basically a public Gitea instance, so it's not a completely new product.

They also co-ordinate development of Forgejo, a soft fork of Gitea (and Codeberg now runs Forgejo rather than Gitea).

Forgejo is pretty neat. They’re developing https://forgefed.org/ , which is an ActivityPub extension for software forges. If it works, it’ll extend the decentralized nature of git to issues, pull requests, etc.

Love to see alternatives to these big code hosting solutions! Personally I'm donating to sourcehut, mainly in "support your local" -mentality, and definitely recommend people doing the same for your favourite projects . But that being said, for most of my coding, I have a simple self-hosted cgit + gitolite setup that suits my needs exactly! Unfortunately, cannot get completely rid of GitHub due to work and open source necessitites.

I am using legit(0). Its simple and straightforward.

https://github.com/icyphox/legit

Here is leigt viewed on legit for those interested.

https://git.icyphox.sh/legit

Now I wonder if there are graph view libs for self hosted git servers. Could be a great side project otherwise.

I package some software hosted on Codeberg. One annoying thing is that it doesn't have an RSS feed for "releases" like GitHub does, so the dev has to email me every time they make a release.

https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/693

This has been added to gitea/forgejo

https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/pull/21696

Yes, I know. The codeberg issue I linked has a link to the upstream gitea issue, which was closed as completed. But presumably codeberg.org hasn't updated their gitea to have that feature yet.

Didn't they recently upgrade 1.19? It should include this change

You could see for yourself, you know. Picking a random repo from the Codeberg org:

    $ curl -LD - 'https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/pages-server/releases.atom'

    HTTP/2 404

Nope: https://codeberg.org/api/v1/version

Saving you a click: it runs on https://forgejo.org/ - a Git service written in go.

HN talk about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34012307

What makes it fast, and is GitHub not fast enough?

Why is their UI (which is Forgejo, fork of Gitea) such a blatant clone of GitHub’s?

I'm guessing the Golang implementation and probably a smaller team working on the frontend?

GitHub is perceptibly slower than Codeberg, just open 2 tab side by side and try them out.

Codeberg being faster might be a side effect of not being very popular yet.

> such a blatant clone of GitHub’s?

I'm guessing for the same reason all cars have the steering wheel and turn signal switch in roughly the same place.

BitBucket and GitLab are more distinct and have made different decisions in some places, for better or worse. Forgejo is just a clone of GitHub with slightly different colors.

Gitlab's design is actually based on BitBucket which came 6 years earlier.

GitLab's design at one point was just a copy and paste of GitHub's entire UI.

Their URL design is heavily based on GitHubs.

e.g. https://cdn0.tnwcdn.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2014/06... / https://cdn0.tnwcdn.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2014/06...

Interesting history. Seems they were influenced by both.

I'm not sure how that's your conclusion.

> Why is their UI (which is Forgejo, fork of Gitea) such a blatant clone of GitHub’s?

because their project goal is to iterate on the ownership model, not to iterate on the web design.

I use a self-hosted forgejo instance now (as of like, a week ago, let's see if I stick with it haha). I like GitHub the piece of software just fine, but I don't like the idea of my code training copilot. I think the design of GitHub is fine and people already know it, so I like that. If the reason you would want to not use GitHub is the design, gitea or forgejo will probably not be to your liking.

> such a blatant clone of GitHub

It's not a bad thing per se. GitHub has an okay interface, why not copy the good parts instead of reinventing the wheel for the sake of it?

We (Gitea) inherited the UI from Gogs, and iirc the UI choice was partially because Gogs was a one man show and partially because a familiar interface eases transition from GitHub.

We have talked about UI refreshes over the years, but it would be a huge undertaking while also keeping up with the rapid iteration.

I mirror my repos to a bunch of services, and I've personally found `git push` to be much slower on codeforge than most places. I suspect they're having some short-lived scaling issues (that I am totally sympathetic to)

Nice!

Hope this one fares better than GitLab. At least they seem to have thought about governance from the start.

What's the "governance" failure? Though I don't use it, GitLab struck me as one of the darlings of how to run an open source company (I love all their public docs), but maybe I'm missing something?

Gitlab is "open-core", not open source.

Open core is a monetisation model, open source is licensing. GitLab is both open core and open source.

Due to the open core monetisation model, a whole lot of GitLab is not open source; "GitLab" can't be said to be open-source, just parts of it. The monetisation model affects the licensing model.

Perhaps they're not referring to a governance failure as such, but rather contrasting a not-for-profit, community-led organisation with a publically-traded, for-profit business? <shrug>

What do they mean by Fast? In terms of website performance?

I'm guessing they mean that, but according to ForgePerf, GitHub is better in that regard.

https://forgeperf.org/

fwiw there's a bug in the system which updates this page and it has grown rather stale. (author of this website)

Good to know. Do you think Codeberg is actually faster than GitHub now?

Couldn't say, but I do think Codeberg's performance is anecdotally reasonable and I'm fond of their ideals and practices.

Yes, pages on Codeberg load so much faster than on GitHub, it blew me away when I first tried it.

Our product is faster!…oh but it’s also newer, smaller, and more limited in features.

IMO Gitlab could be the best alternative to Github but even that doesn't have the number of open source projects hosted on Github. Rather than an alternative Codeberg is an another option for hosting software code for free.

What frustrates me about GitHub is that GitHub Sponsors does not provide controls for associating a users funding amount with anything. Say I want to sell support: I should be able to associate a users sponsorship level with their capability to ask questions, i.e. sponsor my project for $X grants you N questions. GitHub provides no mechanism for this. Codeberg has an opportunity here to one-up GitHub by providing the tools maintainers need to monetize their work. Just imagine being able to sell closed-source licenses for copyleft software right from the interface.

This is one of the biggest problems in OSS imo. I don't think codeberg built this with the sponsorship as the first thing in mind, which means I only see codeberg's own org and own projects asking for funding / maintenance help.

To truly fix open source we need a platform that makes maintaining (and potentially merging similar projects) a breeze. And make sponsorship simple, and make it work. Otherwise new projects will keep popping up on new platforms, and go stale instantly once the maintainer runs out of the passion fuel.

I appreciate what Codeberg is doing for decentralizing code hosting and providing software (Forgejo) with useful features that can compete with Github, but I must say their Terms of Use especially the "Allowed Content" section is one of the worst I've seen. Imagine a CoC but governing an entire website and all its users...

Also, since resilience is key and avoiding dependence on centralized service, Radicle is high-quality open source project building a decentralized git hosting service:

https://radicle.xyz/

Disclaimer: I just love what they do, I am not part of the team and don't hold any of their tokens.

I'm pretty sure I haven't understood correctly but Git is decentralized by default, Git is a decentralized VCS

> No tracking. Your data is not for sale.

Of course, Codeberg is not saying GitHub sells your data, but it seems to imply someone is selling your data if you don't use Codeberg and instead use other services. Is there any backing for this? Who sells your data if you use GitHub that won't sell your data when you use Codeberg?

https://github.com/features/copilot#pricing

They are selling everyone's code through copilot

Copilot is trained on publicly available code.

Are they crawling the internet looking for all the publicly available code that exists or are they just training their model on the code that people upload directly to their servers?

Publically available doesn't mean you can use it for your model. Licenses still exist.

It's publicly available code that comes with licenses on how you can use that code that they ignore, such as share alike but they're charging. That's an ethical issue.

In the early days (months after public release not beta), it would literally give you code stolen from someone's repo, sometimes with credentials (security risk) and project specific stuff. That means because you took code verbatim to the naked eye you would be held liable for license violation.

But it doesn't respect the code's license.

"Publicly available" is different from "licensed under a FOSS license". Anyone other than the original author doesn't have the right to distribute, modify or even execute the code.

Even if the code is licensed under an open source license, in most cases it requires users to attribute the original author, while in some cases derivative work must be licensed under the same license too.

GitHub Copilot use the code without honoring these obligations.

> distribute

Does moving code between a company's data centres count as distribution?

Heck doesn't merely hosting the files count as distribution?

No, but Copilot can be considered a form of distribution.

"Distribute" means distribution to an end user.

You grant GitHub a license to display your code, same for Codeberg, they're not bound by your license because you're granting them specific rights. Secondly can you prove damages when a person uses your code but doesn't attribute you? If you can't your license isn't very useful. This is what we all need to understand.

Displaying the code is different from selling it. GitHub's license explicitly says that it doesn't allow them to sell your code.

How about mirrors?

GitHub doesn't pohobit mirroring repos/developing a fork from someone else's codebases.

The original author didn't grant GitHub a license to use their code, but their code may be used for training the model.

If the code is publicly available on Codeberg, won't GitHub just go take it from there and then sell it through copilot?

Not a lawyer, but there is an existing lawsuit against CoPilot, and Github might have some leverage from the fact that the code is hosted there (I have not read their TOS). Scraping code from a different provider and spitting verbatim copies of it stripped of a license seems like next level fuckery to me. Fucking people is Microsoft's DNA, though, so I'm sure they've already done that.

https://githubcopilotlitigation.com/

No tracking is a major point for Codeberg; doesn't matter whether data is sold or not in times of FAANG - Google doesn't sell your data either but uses it to sell ads placement. Can't understand zealots pontificating about F/OSS, then turning to github to sell their user's clicks and eyeballs, and also give away very detailed sensor data (such as fixes in response to issues) for Copilot and future ChatGPT-based coding bots.

My new breakfast cereal is different, it contains zero rusty nails!

Is codeberg.org finally friendly to noscript/basic (x)html browsers?

(account creation/major use case/etc).

I really don't like how when you are viewing a repo. That the giant codeberg footer still is shown. This makes the distinction between repo and website confusing. Could the footer be removed when viewing repos? Or at minimum at least made to a tiny one liner or something.

ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED for me, today as well as in the past

What the benefit of this vs. sr.ht?

I guess it's better for people the prefer the GitHub-style “pull request” workflow over the traditional e-mail-based workflow.

The only field where companies want to run on donations and communism.

Running on donations is antithetic to communism.

What company?

> Codeberg e.V. is a registered non-profit association based in Berlin, Germany.

https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/what-is-codeberg/#...

They totally ripped of the github UI and UX. They're all about free and open source, but they don't want to do the hard work of coming up with their own product. I would much rather use the for-profit original rather than a lazy open-source knockoff.

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