Infrastructure should be neutral. Codeberg is a social club
My wishlist: free for open source and paid for closed source, able to do simple projects that are handwritten and also complex projects including AI LLM code that needs CI/CD/auditing, and hosting in the UK or EU.
Aside, I donate money to Codeberg because I think Codeberg is a wonderful service with strong commitment to free open source, and because I host some larger projects and AI projects that are for public welfare social good.
To Tangled -- it's great that the core code is MIT licensed and anyone could stand up a competing appview (the credible-exit property of atproto).
Do Tangled Labs Oy's articles include a purpose clause instead of the default profit-only purpose[0]? Or is something similar on the roadmap?
[0] OYL 1:5 reads The purpose of a company is to generate profits for the shareholders, unless otherwise provided in the Articles of Association.
You're deliberately avoiding a network effect lock-in by being federated, you make competition trivial by giving away not only the protocol but also making your code available, and you don't even restrict commercial competition by using the MIT license rather than, say, BSL.
To me that sounds like you are deliberately starting a race-to-the-bottom competition on price with, well, everyone capable of hosting a SaaS? Heck, if you don't end up with some solid competition the whole "federated code" USP doesn't play out. To me that doesn't exactly scream "good return on my €3,8M seed round". Am I missing a brilliant plan here, or should we expect a rug pull a few years down the line?
Infrastructure can never be neutral, because infrastructure is owned and costs resources to run. All infrastructure comes with rules, be they the voting consensus of some e.V. or state-run entity, the whims of an individual on their private server, or the corporate interests of something owned by a, well, corporation.
The problem isn't "neutral infrastructure". The problem is an overreliance on centralized services even though most such services are relatively easy to host yourself.
I run my own DevOps server based entirely on OSS. Is it github? No. Does it what I need it to do? Absolutely. Do I get 99.999% uptime? No, but when it's down or slow, I can fix it. When the corporate platform is down, I can only wait.
And "network effects" are not a good argument. Open Source was wildly successful long before centraliced DevOps platforms.
And in hindsight, the added friction of getting in touch with projects before being able to send them any code, was a benefit not a disadvantage. Because it acted as a barrier of entry that disincentivized alot of subpar code from hitting these projects in the first place.
The value these centralized services provide is the centralization itself - that makes things easy to find. Remember the web before Altavista? Finding anything was detective work, guessing domains, following links through multiple pages, digging in newsgroups, asking around, and so on.
Open source was successful, but not nearly at the same level it is now thanks to precisely platforms such as GitHub (and Launchpad, and Bitbucket, and Gitlab, etc) that added useful functionality such as bug trackers and project management on top of a version control system.
Now, if we could do something like GitHub on top of a network such as Mastodon, then we would have something that's centralized enough to be useful and distributed enough to be indestructible.
And in recent years, how is the centralized world of websearch doing?
https://www.techspot.com/news/101560-study-confirms-search-r...
> Open source was successful, but not nearly at the same level it is now thanks to precisely platforms such as GitHub (and Launchpad, and Bitbucket, and Gitlab, etc) that added useful functionality such as bug trackers and project management on top of a version control system.
None of that depends on a centralized provider. I have all the features you listed on my self-hosted platform as well.
Even if whoever owns and runs the infra would like that to be the case, the law of wherever they are can put restrictions on this as well.
Anyone who joins the association (small fee) can vote.
So, yes, it's technically a democracy, but it deserves extra nuance in my mind because it might not be what everyone immediately thinks a democracy should feel like.
That's a fairly good starting place. Might seem innocuous, but don't forget that "far right" has no agreed upon boundary. You might as well replace it with "wrong think" at this point.
Which, again, good for them. I could care less. I left a little over a month ago once I figured out what was going on. They are perfectly allowed their fiefdom on the internet, but I would never recommend the platform to anyone as a useful Git forge unless they happen to sit in that little thought bubble.
But that's the game, I suppose. Everyone knows what's going on and they just don't care. And so I don't care about Codeberg :)