I always wonder what GitHub has that Codeberg doesn't. It's a shame this isn't as popular. It seems like developers, of all people, are willingly letting their code be AI piggybacked.
None of this is a defence of GitHub. But if you want to enact change, you have to understand the reasons why people remain in the status quo.
it's really easy because the codeberg importer is really good
it correctly imports all your pull requests and issues, preserving usernames, everything
you then put the new URL in the GitHub description and archive the project
and then a year down the line you delete the GitHub repository entirely
I moved about 70 projects, half a dozen with several hundred stars and forks
and each major project that leaves does n^2 damage to GitHub, it's the network effect in reverse!
They are so fanatical that many groups are unable to use them.
Sourcehut for example is hostile towards cryptocurrency related projects.
Coderberg is hostile towards private repos.
I had open-sourced stuff there licensed under Creative Commons, which was forcibly removed. They do spell the license requirements out in their terms, I just can't wrap my head around the obstinacy. Calling it unhelpful do-goodery would be flattering. Fanatical is indeed the right word.
I pay for Sourcehut hosting. I like that I'm on a system which rejects cryptocurrency projects.
See also the 248 comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26943408 from when that came out 4 years ago.
Or in pop culture terms, I would reject a FOSS version of the Torment Nexus too.
Get real. It's a community project with limited resources. If they had the money for hosting I'm sure that would be offered for FOSS projects, which their bylaws requires to focus on.
> Coderberg is hostile towards private repos.
Disclaimer: I'm a member of Codeberg e.V., though not part of the presidium or any official representative position.
We're a non-profit (charitable) with the explicit goal of being host to free and open source projects. We run on donations, donations that are made with that specific goal. Why should we provide storage and git hosting for proprietary projects? That is not and has not been the goal of the entire organization. Yeah, I guess that makes us unusable to many groups, technically. But Codeberg was founded for that specific purpose, after all we're a nonprofit, not a business.
If you want to host proprietary projects, Codeberg isn't the place for it and it doesn't want to be.
Also, no you won't be immediately banned if you make 3 private repositories. I myself have a few private repos, mostly projects that never got anywhere close to finished but also personal notes or my nginx server config.
https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/faq/#before-i-star...
Is it really free, though? You get free service - MS gets everyone's code for free. Only a fool would believe that they don't use private repos for training.
And even if it was free, do you really believe it is sustainable to just offer unlimited service for free to anyone? They've created an environment where you're punished for using anything but github. This is not good.
You don't need to convince me, you need to convince the millions of people who prefer the convenience of "Free as in Beer SaaS" over the resilience and self-sufficiency that we get by hosting our own systems.
Aside from previously established dominance and associated network effects, a whole lot of individually little things which add up to a lot.
> It's a shame this isn't as popular. It seems like developers, of all people, are willingly letting their code be AI piggybacked.
So long as the AI firms operate under the assumption (and courts so far in the US at least seem inclined to favor this view) that training AI on copyright-protected material isn't infringement, any publicly-exposed code is going to be subject to AI piggybacking, not just code hosted on Github.
I really created a github account to star other people's project and my keepassxc had got deleted by me messing around in my linux so I had lost access to my codeberg previous account and I think even my previous github account too but I went around to create a new github account but never a new codeberg account untill just recently (literally 1 hour ago lol)
for me I could star a lot of projects and show support and there is even github donations. Its not as if I like github but I am giving my reasoning as to why I think the reason is that github won and codeberg hadn't.
There are still a lot of people which use codeberg but a lack of awareness is also one part and the lack of people on codeberg. To me, like, I thought that if my project is on codeberg then it would get less stars (I was really chasing stars back then lol) and it would get less visibility and less people contributing and so on I think...
Doesn't also help when you need a github account anyways to contribute to a git project in the sense that you ask them an issue.
IIRC I wanted to ask a github issue on some project and that's why I had created my original account but then started hosting some code between codeberg and github from exclusively codeberg to then all code on github...
Now I am starting to take back on that by hosting things on codeberg again from a fresh account.
Also: GitHub is so established that for many people git and GitHub are the same thing.
If a person really cares about your project and wants to improve it and not just boost their own GH stats - creating an account takes no time or they can always send you patches via email.
Personally I use Gitlab.
They explain the rules here: https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/faq/#how-about-pri...
I want 100% certainty that if my side project makes money they're not going to come after me for breaking terms. Anything less is worthless.
this is completely unrealistic even if you're paying a company to host your stuff
you can be sued by anyone for anything at any time, regardless of your opinion of "unambiguous"
Yes, lawsuits are how contract disputes are settled. "The law is on your side" means a court will side with you in case of a lawsuit.
are you?
need I remind you, you said:
> I want 100% certainty that if my side project makes money they're not going to come after me
there is NEVER any certainty that your counterparty won't come after you, even if you think your contract is "unambiguous"
because that not how the system works
I'm saying vague promises are worthless, not the service if you do 100% FOSS.
I actually went and found the source as I wanted to ask you but I felt like HN police might come saying to give a google search so I am going to paste it here to save someone else a google search but also here is the main thing
> 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.
https://codeberg.org/magicfelix/Codeberg-Documentation/src/b...
Funny thing is that I found this through by copying the statement from the hackernews comment and I was only able to find this through HN.
The idea that I would choose a company because is from Europe instead of America, is kinda insane to be honest, I'm from Spain, Europe and my only peeve with products from America is that sometimes the cost to send products here is a bit too much for products like kinesis, aeron, books from nostarch, etc.
Good for Codeberg for giving the hosting service for free to FOSS projects, but there is no way I'm giving so much power to a few volunteers over my projects.
I wish GitHub would implement a feature to hide/private the projects I follow/star, that's the only thing I miss in GitHub.
Others have issue with their code being used in AI training, but I find no issue in that myself, my code is not exclusively mine anyway and I have no say in how it is being used.
Is Codeberg actually effective at preventing crawling of public code they host?
Codeberg might be getting more popular, but the slope of growth from Github is way higher than theirs.
I have several projects I’d want to move over but thats enough of a barrier for me to lose interest. There’s also Forgejo Actions but I assume paying for your own runner is probably more expensive than GitHub.
Codeberg has free Forgejo Actions instance that you can use without a request, but with limited resources[1]:
> own runner is probably more expensive than GitHub
You can rent a VPS for as cheap as $15/year or run it locally.
However I would not trust external contributors' code on my server.
Codeberg is a community driven project, which provides CI for FOSS projects, and it's a bit unfair to expect them to provide free compute for random and/or private projects.
For what it's worth, I've had better experience with running self-hosted Forgejo Actions runners compared to self-hosted Github Actions runners.
That said, what can codeberg really protect against if they’re just a European take on GitHub?