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.
For many it isn’t easy to just up and abandon what they built on GitHub, especially if they have a big community and open issues and PRs. Familiarity also plays a big role, you can’t simply expect to open an account on a different forge and be done, it consumes time to get acquainted with the new stuff. Also GitHub may give access to more resources: For example, you can just use GitHub actions in your repo, private or public; to use the equivalent on Codeberg you have to request access and be approved.
That and I don't feel as guilty putting my hare brained nonsensical half baked at best personal projects that nobody other than me will ever clone on GitHub.
> "They are so fanatical that many groups are unable to use them."
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.
> They are so fanatical that many groups are unable to use them.
> 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.
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.
A private repo doesn't cost more resources than a public one. The likeliest scenario is the exact opposite - popular public repos generate far more traffic and incur more costs.
Saying that as someone who keeps my open source projects primarily on codeberg: Getting access to Codeberg CI is a bureaucracy, it has outages due to DDOS attacks every other week and there are a good number of open source developers who are making non-negligible money via GH sponsors.
Sure, for my private projects I already run my own Gitea and Woodpecker CI (and my own docker registry, and my own Taiga server for project management, and my own baserow server to replace airtable, etc...) but the moment you say "just get a VPS to run this service that is available for free at $BIGCORP", you lost 90% of the potential users.
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.
> I always wonder what GitHub has that Codeberg doesn't.
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.
If I was sufficiently motivated to leave GH for such idealistic reasons, it wouldn't be worth moving to another third-party host. That just means a few years later there will be some new idealistic reason to leave the new host, and I'll have to make the effort of switching all over again. If I ever leave GH, it'll be to self-hosting.
That is also a disadvantage, Github has a lot more grifters, people submitting fraudulent and malicious PRs, issues spam. In similar vain as "everybody is on windows" and Linux not being targeted by malware as often.
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.
Worthless _to you_. Given that it's a free service, I think it's perfectly reasonable that they only want to host Free software. There are any number of other tools catering to businesses.
all the usual arguments. I get where he's coming from, I thought like this for a long time as well. I wouldn't pride myself in having sold all my bitcoins in 2016. I regret having dabbled in stuff like ethereum around that time when I could've just stuck with bitcoin. I just didn't see it. conflating the nft/dao/web3/shitcoin sphere with bitcoin vibe with me either. good luck to him with paper money, I'm going with bitcoin, come what will. I'm not on a mission, do what feels right. I'm not judging. just weirded out by the thought of someone not wanting OSS software of that sort to be hosted on their platform. where does it end? ban users who are active in that area outside of your platform? people are using postgres unethically to store illegal data, stolen pii and credit cards. tor is used for csam. I have difficulties understanding this line of thinking and it feels more like an ethical way to exclude a group of people you just don't like. could be totally wrong of course.
Wait really? is that the case, I didn't know that!
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.
Why would any adult give so much power to a few people over their project for what would be a few $$ at most in GitHub if not free.
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.
I too would like to understand why. Perhaps the only one I care for is that I would not like to give too much power to Microsoft in choosing who can contribute.
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.
I'm banned from GitHub because I didn't give them my mobile phone number, but I wouldn't switch to another provider that could easily do the exact same thing - "fool me twice"
No AI, EU based, so respects the GDPR for all users, regardless of where they live, you can send PRs to make it better, is 100% Free Software, has its own Actions system that is also 100% Free Software, the logo is nice, you can become a member of the Berlin based association and have a direct vote on policy/feature changes.
Definitely network effects. For work, when I am interested in finding whether the authors of a research paper put up their code somewhere, I often type github in the search query. There are some others, of course, but its the default location. I'll be looking into this one though. I'd never heard of it.
You can bring your own Woodpecker CI or Forgejo Actions runners. The cheapest solution is to just run them at home in a VM.
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.
It exists yes, but you need to request access to it (which is manually reviewed), comes with a bunch of restrictions and it’s a limited resource.
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.
You're missing the point. We want AI to piggyback on our open source code, because then thousands of developers around the world can piggyback on that AI. That AI is a boon for users, and is just as useful as documentation and a discussion forum.
