If you aren't doing FOSS software and aren't "tolerated" you aren't allowed here. This is not an alternative to Github.
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/
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.
That may be so. I also don't like that. But the way to address that is not to be full of yourself yourself.
FOSS is for free. Non-FOSS is $infinity. It's a very simple price plan.
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.
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...
In general I prefer if people keep their politics out of IT infrastructure. We don't all agree on what makes the world better and what makes it worse.
That said, I don't have a problem with this particular project. It's absolutely fine to create a git hosting solution specifically for open source as open source is itself a very big tent spanning a wide range of ideologies and groups that are otherwise hostile towards each other.
It is in fact commercial closed source software that is increasingly subject to political restrictions that are justified by supposedly making the world a better place.
I 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 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.
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.
That's not how it works. There are no neutral positions.
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.
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.
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).
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Except for those who don't want their code to be used for training proprietary AI models.
What are you basing this on? I use open-source tools and products everyday for work.
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
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.
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.
Yes, use-restricted licenses aren’t Free Software. Codeberg is a non-profit that promotes Free Software. Not a joke, just out of mission.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
those all allow commercial use. so programmers who want to prevent commercial use cannot use CodeBerg.
The GPL and AGPL are both on the list that you're replying to.
https://choosealicense.com/appendix
so I will defer to that over your opinion.
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)
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[1] https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/licensing/
[2] https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-comm...