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I could understand if the reasoning to go with GitHub vs GitLab was more about number of developers on platform, but it is hard to accept the reasoning.

You’re chastising GitLab for becoming a platform and chasing enterprise users… The alternative is Microsoft, and supporting a monopoly power.

It seems to me like choosing GitLab would foster a more equal ecosystem of forge choices, kind of like me supporting Mozilla encourages a more equal ecosystem of browsers.

GitLab is still open source and GitHub has never been.

I'm not chastising them: they're making the move that is most rational given their publicly-traded status. That's their prerogative.

What you're probably picking up on is that I do miss the old GitLab. My emotions there aren't anger or frustration, it's more nostalgia and a faint sense of sadness. They were the good guys, and while they're still open core the open source spirit that they once had seems to have faded.

> It seems to me like choosing GitLab would foster a more equal ecosystem of forge choices, kind of like me supporting Mozilla encourages a more equal ecosystem of browsers.

This is actually a very good comparison. I'm writing this from Firefox, which I use on principle to avoid supporting Google, but I also deeply distrust Mozilla and have a long list of things I wish they would do differently. They're not good, they're just better than Google.

I also use a local Forgejo instance for my personal projects, even though I trust Forgejo's governance even less than Mozilla's. I only use them because I trust them better than I do Microsoft, GitLab, or Gitea.

I didn't write the above to try to dissuade anyone from choosing a FOSS software forge, merely to acknowledge that there is no obvious good choice that any given FOSS project should choose. All three of the forges that can claim to compete with GitHub have pretty substantial red flags for their long-term viability, and I can sympathize with any project deciding that they'd rather go with the simplest option.

I appreciate the thoughtful response!

> I didn't write the above to try to dissuade anyone from choosing a FOSS software forge, merely to acknowledge that there is no obvious good choice that any given FOSS project should choose. All three of the forges that can claim to compete with GitHub have pretty substantial red flags for their long-term viability, and I can sympathize with any project deciding that they'd rather go with the simplest option.

I posted mostly to discourage this particular opinion. IMHO there is a clear choice — at the very least between GitLab and GitHub in this conversation, especially in with the F/OSS consideration.

Maybe it’s better to flip the question — what makes you trust Microsoft more than GitLab in this situation?

> Maybe it’s better to flip the question — what makes you trust Microsoft more than GitLab in this situation?

There's exactly one way in which I trust Microsoft more, but it's important: I believe that they are less likely to pull the rug out from under us. Not that they won't, but they're less likely to.

GitHub seems to have found a favorable business model and is enjoying its status as the destination for all source code. We might not like how they pull that off or what they do with the data they have, but they've been a stable platform for years now without any signs of removing features or privileges that people rely on.

GitLab, on the other hand, has made numerous shifts over recent years, eliminating or vastly curtailing their free tiers and pushing more and more of their development effort out of the open core and into the enterprise portion of the product. After the sheer number of changes they've made to their SaaS offering I wouldn't trust GitLab's hosted offering to stay stable for the next 10 years.

If you're self-hosting this is less of an issue, but I frankly also don't trust GitLab to not start playing the same games that so many companies have been playing lately and pull out of true open source entirely. If security updates ever stop, and I see that as a real possibility, we'll have to migrate anyway.

So this is why I sympathize with people choosing GitHub: it's been stable for a very long time and shows every sign of staying that way, while the other offerings are clearly in flux.

> There's exactly one way in which I trust Microsoft more, but it's important: I believe that they are less likely to pull the rug out from under us. Not that they won't, but they're less likely to.

This I agree with in some sense! There are just so many people standing on the rug that it's a harder pull in total.

That said, I do think that it's easier for them to make small changes that extract value. GitLab always has a nuclear option (at least for now) -- you can run the F/OSS version (and if you don't want to, you can find someone to run it for you which also grows the ecosystem).

> without any signs of removing features or privileges that people rely on.

This I doubt... But nothing comes to mind immediately so I'll bite my tongue!

> GitLab, on the other hand, has made numerous shifts over recent years, eliminating or vastly curtailing their free tiers and pushing more and more of their development effort out of the open core and into the enterprise portion of the product. After the sheer number of changes they've made to their SaaS offering I wouldn't trust GitLab's hosted offering to stay stable for the next 10 years. > > If you're self-hosting this is less of an issue, but I frankly also don't trust GitLab to not start playing the same games that so many companies have been playing lately and pull out of true open source entirely. If security updates ever stop, and I see that as a real possibility, we'll have to migrate anyway. > > So this is why I sympathize with people choosing GitHub: it's been stable for a very long time and shows every sign of staying that way, while the other offerings are clearly in flux.

So I disagree about GitLab (and there's the simple fact that it an be forked/actually is F/OSS), but thanks for the explanation here, I see how you got to where you stand -- when I think of GitLab's changes I just think of them trying to find a way to sustain their income/the thing that lets them push the F/OSS forward, but I totally get seeing it the other way and being tired of the shifting companies have been going through!

> even though I trust Forgejo's governance even less than Mozilla's

Would you like to tell why you don't trust the forgejo governance? Are there any specific points or only a "feeling"?

Ok, found above

> Codeberg.org's fork of Gitea (Forgejo) has a governance structure that is more appealing in that it is not profit-oriented, but I'm nervous about overmoderation in the Forgejo community [2]. Constructive opposition to the election of moderators (based on their past abuse of authority) got edited away as "ad hominem attacks" and has since been completely deleted from the election thread.

Interesting, never saw smth like this, maybe this has changed over time. They now log any moderation so you can ask for the moderation actions. And when a comment is deleted an information message gets added by the forgejo moderation team to inform about the deletion.

I elaborated on the incident in this comment [0]. I read the comments that got deleted and they were constructive and informative. Not only did the Forgejo team edit them, they appear to have gone back and deleted them entirely and there's also no record on the Internet Archive. The only public record that there was any opposition to that appointment at all is a random Hacker News thread.

I'm very uncomfortable with speech being censored unless there's a very clear reason (which there wasn't in this case) and I'm even more uncomfortable with it when the topic at hand is the appointment of a new moderator.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40677150

As someone who just setup Gitea on a personal server, that will strictly be used by me and maybe a couple friend's or family members in the future, is there any down side to just continuing to use it? If its fully self hosted on my server, no connection to any business work, and only used for personal stuff, should I care at all about their governance structure, possible changes to the license, etc? Seems like any kind of shady data sucking changes in an update would have a huge stink made about it.

I'm not aware of any problems with Gitea yet. I'm just nervous because of the lack of clarity surrounding their future plans.

Thanks for the info!

Just a random thought, but would some kind of partnership or merger between Mozilla and Codeberg... be good for both, and for the Internet?

I don't know.

Mozilla's leadership has been bad for a while now, and while I currently use Forgejo for my personal stuff, what I saw of Forgejo's leadership in that issue makes me nervous about the parent organization as well.

Since they've deleted the criticism from the issue and removed it from the Internet Archive, I feel some level of obligation to get down my memory of that conversation before it fades, and here seems as good a place as any:

This person, crystal, applied to become an "enforcer" after previously having lost a lot of trust in the community. That bit you can still see, including the acknowledgement that this abuse of authority did occur. Someone posted saying basically that they still didn't trust crystal after whatever happened previously (they gave details of the story, but I don't remember them) and that they were opposed to their appointment to any position of authority, regardless of promises that they wouldn't do it again.

After a bit of back and forth, someone (I'm assuming Earl Warren) went in and edited all of this critic's comments with a note saying that the comments had been removed by the moderation team for "ad hominem attacks". That was disturbing to me at the time—the critic's criticisms were not non sequiturs, when someone is applying to be an "enforcer" their past abuse of authority is absolutely relevant!

And of course, now that I find that they have now memory-holed that discussion entirely I'm even more perturbed. That's not the behavior of an organization that deserves any of our trust, and I don't know how much of the bad behavior that I saw there applies to Codeberg as a whole.

Understood entirely. Thank you.

It used to be a lot easier to think of do-gooder organizations in tech that seemed trustworthy, and easy decisions to back. I don't know how much it is change of the orgs, and how much it is that we have more information about them.

My next random idea would be the Internet Archive, taking up ensuring an open Git forge is available to society. There's arguably some overlap of mission, in preserving information, and they do big infrastructure already. But my wild first guess is that this probably isn't enough overlap for them to justify the investment it would require.

I don't think the FSF would be able to execute on anything viable, though there's mission overlap, and their heart is in the right place.