Daphne Preston-Kendal
There was an article about moving to Codeberg on the orange website yesterday, and out of interest to get an impression of what average programmers think of the idea of moving, I took at look at the comments. (Yeah, I know …)
I’m going to write here my thoughts on a general impression of the comment thread as a whole. (Rather than respond to individuals.)
Daphne Preston-Kendal
To begin by addressing what seemed to be a misconception underlying a lot of the comments:
Codeberg, the website, does not aim to replace GitHub. We poke fun at their recent foibles in our PR sometimes, but we do not want to become them.
We do not want to replace one single point of failure with another! (Admittedly, I think Codeberg.org, run by a non-profit, as SPOF would be better than GitHub.com, run by Microsoft, as an SPOF, but that’s not the goal!)
Daphne Preston-Kendal
(This thread reflects only my own views and not those of the remainder of the Codeberg presidium, board – nor (most importantly) does it reflect the views of the members of Codeberg as a whole, who ultimately make the decisions.)
Daphne Preston-Kendal
Codeberg is different.
Codeberg is a non-profit.
Moreover, it is a *democratic* non-profit. You can (and, if you actively use Codeberg, should) become a member and you will have an equal vote and a fair say in the running of the association, and in any decisions we make about what to offer and what not to offer.
This democratic right is guaranteed to you not only by our constitution, but by German law, which guarantees that the membership as a whole has the ultimate decision-making power.
Daphne Preston-Kendal
Microsoft’s shareholders are probably very pleased about this.
But if Microsoft needs to please its shareholders and turn the revenue dial up a bit again (say, because they’ve got themselves tied up in a huge economic bubble, and need to bolster the bottom line after it pops), they might choose to take away some of those free goodies.
In fact, it’s not just a hypothetical – they started doing that just recently. https://web.archive.org/web/20260223084443/https://github.com/resources/insights/2026-pricing-changes-for-github-actions
Those changes are ‘postponed’, but assume they will come.
Daphne Preston-Kendal
Microsoft is a for-profit company. They have attracted a lot of projects to them by giving away free goodies, like an immense amount of computing power for CI, and over the years have increased the amount of stuff you get for free. (Not long ago you had to pay for personal private repos …)
By continuously sweetening the deal for smaller users, then getting orgs to pay once they start needing collaboration features, GitHub built up over a billion dollars in revenue per year (as of 2022).
Daphne Preston-Kendal
Apart from that, many people listed things that GitHub provides for free which Codeberg doesn’t provide or requires self-hosting for. The biggest one was CI, but there were other things too.
And I think the only way I can respond to that is by talking about the fundamentally different organizational models that GitHub and Codeberg have – not to plead on our smaller size, but to plead on principles.
Daphne Preston-Kendal
(If someone’s forge were hosting completely objectionable, hateful content we might choose to turn their OAuth support off. But, for example, you can have as many private and non-free repositories as you like that way. More on that in a bit though …)
(Furthermore, this thread reflects only my own views and not those of the remainder of the Codeberg presidium, board – nor (most importantly) does it reflect the views of the members of Codeberg as a whole, who ultimately make the decisions.)
Daphne Preston-Kendal
Forge federation is something we’re actively pushing for because of this. Full federation support is still a few years ahead of us, probably, but you can already set up your own forge in a way that minimizes inconvenience to users by using Codeberg as a single sign-on provider for a self-hosted forge.
https://git.madhouse-project.org/, which hosts the Iocaine project, is a great example of this. If you set up Codeberg as SSO for your own site, almost all of our content rules are irrelevant to you.
Daphne Preston-Kendal
We are much more excited by the idea of creating an ecosystem of forges (and different forge software) than in becoming the new one place where absolutely everything is hosted.
I am, for example, very pleased that even while switching to Forgejo, Fedora decided to keep on self-hosting rather than jumping to us.
To be clear, we’re open for everyone who needs us, especially individuals working on their own smaller projects. But other forges are our friends, not our competition
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