Since Microsoft owns Github, Gitlab is Corp owned now since 2022, why are so many who preach privacy or using Linux, etc, still using a MS product?
Genuine questions. I’m assumming either familiarity & simplicity with GH or difficulty migrating elsewhere?
I suck at programming, and GH is easier to use. As I learn more, and gain some skill, I’ll waste Codeberg’s server space instead of Microsoft’s
I remember when I started on Linux and the open source world in general that the “Releases” button on Github was like an omnipresent being, you knew it was there but not where.
Probably it was just me being dumb but idk.
to me cloning from codeberg is much slower than github and sometimes even fails. i understand it’s not possible to have m$ scale server geo balancing and stuff from a nonprofit but yeah. i do try to use it more these days tho.
Regarding Codeberg:
- Codeberg only services free and open source projects
- There are other limitatiosns:
- They don’t provide a free, well designed and isolated CI like GitHub does
- The space of Packages/Registry is limited
- As it’s quite niche there are a lot less people on that platform in general
- Although GitHub is under fire for their uptime: The uptime of Codeberg is quite comparable to GitHub, when having a look at the functionality that both platforms have in common.
Regarding self-hosting:
- Too expensive / time intensive for most devs that just want to code
are you using all those qualifiers for the CI together, or separately? Because they absolutely have free CI
Well it’s “free” but it quite a lot of caveats, restrictions and requires signing up.
Very nice! This makes total sense. Let me rebuttal with Enshittification
“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”
Microsoft is good at fucking up platforms they acquire! Lately they’ve just been more patient with it.
The network effect is whats keeping people on the shit and why enshittification works.
What do you mean rebuttal? Both are true.
Touché. I was just meaning response
That’s not a rebuttal. If it was, then Facebook would be dead. Twitter would be dead. Reddit would be dead. Windows would be dead.
It is almost trivial to move git code from one hoster to another. If GitHub becomes so bad, you just move.
A big issue though is that you can’t move other people’s projects for them. If I want to contribute to Immich, I have to be on GitHub. Cloning it somewhere the maintainers aren’t looking or accepting contributions does nothing.
It’s trivial if your project is trivial. Once you’ve got development/CI/CD workflows, releases, issue management, community interaction, maybe even project management or Github pages (may god have mercy on your soul), it gets a lot less trivial.
Git itself is a distributed version control system, moving it around is indeed trivial. It’s everything else that Github provides that is far less trivial, and they’ve worked hard on building the vendor lock-in elements for those things lately.
True, but there are also exporter scripts for that stuff. Many projects have also mirroring already set up.
PoV: I’m a dev and I want to put my code out there. GH is basically a social network that aims to show my project to like-minded folk, no other service does that. Personally I enjoy this social aspect and occasionally check on GH feed to see what the circle around me is doing, to catch sw trends.
Why would I be concerned about privacy when the idea is to make it public? GH is just a free host that happens to be most popular and it would reach most eyes, the best chance of getting back some contributions.
If I used any other git hosting service - my code would be scrapped just the same, but would reach almost no human. If I tried to publicise the project myself, the other devs and potential new users will be far more likely to click on a GH link than any alternative. Self hosted solution would get least clicks. People like familiar URLs that lead them to “safe” sites.
Among big tech, I actually prefer Microsoft over Google, Meta and others. Yes, MS is just as disgusting, but at least they are grossly incompetent and only manage to execute a fraction of evil schemes they come up with. It’s funny to watch actually.
For what it’s worth, Codeberg/Forgejo is working on adding federation features that will (eventually) connect different instances together to rebuild the “social network” part of things without centralizing on a single individual instance, much like the Fediverse is working on doing for other social networks.
Federation doesn’t fix the problem, at least not in its entirety. I posted a longer comment in another thread but the long and short of it is that accounts need to be portable if it’s going to work for a git hosting solution.
The comment: https://lemmy.zip/comment/26430897
deleted by creator
I’d say familiarity is it.
It sure isnt the uptime!
Inertia is a hell of a fundamental property of the universe.
I am moving to codeberg / forgejo… slowly… I’m gonna migrate everything one day I swear.
it’s also because they don’t believe the same confused fundamentalist nonsense OP does
For Codeberg, they don’t allow commercial projects. You of course have Forgejo (which is what Codeberg utilises), and many open-source developers have been moving to it. I’ve also heard some projects switching over to GitLab as well, which is corporate-owned, but I believe has a self-hosted option that gives people a little more control. But for many people, GitHub works fine as it is and don’t want the hassle of transferring their projects, commit history, issues, etc. over.
Where does Codeberg rule out commercial projects? I’ve never heard of that being banned over there. (Do you perhaps mean closed-source?)
There is ambiguity in their ToS regarding commercial projects.
They have said that they have to clear it up IIRC because they aren’t against it, they just have to figure out what to officially allow and not or something.
Gittea also for closed source/companies who don’t want to host their own repos.
why are so many who preach privacy or using Linux, etc, still using a MS product?
As someone else already mentioned, familarity. You published a repo of your foss project so other people can contribute to it and the more the merrier. Most people happen to be on github.
I think Microsoft learned their lesson finally on fucking up acquisitions (talking Mixer especially lol) where they buy out a platform but then curse it with their touch and it fails. Now, with LinkedIn and Github, they sort of leave it be with subtle and incremental changes because then petiole continue to adopt it. Now its like FB or Snapchat where people are there bc they think everyone else is there (assuming). Idk, it sucks.
That’s why a federated git repo network of could be pretty cool.
Forgejo (the basis for Codeberg) is working on ActivityPub federation
One thing that keeps me from using codeberg more is that private repos are limited to 100MB. So I still need to use GitHub to keep some of my personal projects that contain purchased assets that can’t be made public. I do still have a codeberg account and mirror what I can, but it means I can’t stop using GitHub for now.
Oh wow I did not realize there a limit. Is that per project? Maybe that was a limit initially? I’ve cloned a couple repos but I guess I’ve not checked size.
It’s for private repos only, so if you cloned public repos that wouldn’t count towards the limit.
And it sounds like it’s total for your whole account, you can read about it here:
https://codeberg.org/Codeberg-e.V./requests
Storing private repositories is allowed for things related to Free Software, or small content like personal notes. It is limited to 100 MiB per user.
And: https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/faq/#how-about-private-repositories?
Codeberg’s mission is to promote free/libre software. Keeping software private is obviously not our primary use case, but we acknowledge that private repositories are useful or necessary at times.
- If you are a contributor to free/libre software projects, we allow up to 100 MB of private content for your convenience. Use it for your personal notes, your side project or any other you want to keep private.
So yeah, my unity projects with paid assets are ostensibly “side projects”, but 100MB is less than the size of the unity project file or blender assets. So if I can’t use codeberg to keep my unity projects, and I can’t use it to contribute to projects that live on GitHub (like Immich), or to host forks of projects for the original authors to see where the original repo and author is on GitHub, I basically can only use it to mirror projects that I want to “put out into the world” with no specific audience in mind. And for that purpose, so few people ever actually come across my projects that I feel like I might as well just email them to myself.
The biggest use case for using GitHub for me is to interact with people and projects that are on GitHub.
For private repos you could always host your own Forgejo. That way they’re actually private, too, not that Codeberg is untrustworthy, but not needing to trust anyone is even better.
I mean I’m not really concerned about it being actually private, I just need to not have asset creators become pissed at me for publicly hosting their paid assets. Self hosting forgejo is on my to-do list but until then I’m using GitHub as a free project host for my unity/blender projects with paid assets. A single one of those projects easily blows past the codeberg 100MB private repo limit.
Besides that, basically the only use I have for GitHub is to contribute to repos on GitHub or to open / comment on issues. So it feels kind of useless to use codeberg since it defeats the whole purpose when the repos I want to interact with aren’t there.
Self hosting also means I wouldn’t be able to accept PRs, comments, or issues from other people unless I let them create accounts, which is something I don’t want to moderate. I was waiting for forgejo to get federation to self host it but I haven’t seen an update from them about that in a while.
So basically there are 2 things I use GitHub for:
- Keeping private projects safe, which are too big for codeberg to allow
- Opening issues on repos that are on GitHub, so using codeberg completely defeats the purpose
Codeberg is like a GitHub where the projects I want to interact with don’t exist, and copying the projects there doesn’t help me give feedback to the original authors.
It’s not just familiarity, it’s lack of awareness of the history of how we got to here.
Part of what made OSS into what it is was the last 30 years of advocacy. A lot of those advocates are now middle-aged and thinking more about retirement than about the next wave of OSS that needs to supplant the Big Tech that OSS built.
Back in 2001, OSS development centered around mailing lists. https://marc.info/ is a graveyard of OSS mailing lists that largely died off somewhere between 2010-2015. Just as most of the earlier wave of OSS folks were having kids and settling into their middle-tier jobs with the Big Tech firms they helped build.
Gen A / Gen Z needs to step into the advocacy shoes that the Gen X / Millenial OSS advocates filled 20-some years ago. Figure out where next-gen OSS will be built and get to it.
When going so far back: Please do not leave out the FL part of FLOSS. Free/Libre software kicked this all off, the OSS is a later attempt to “sell” the development process FL software came up with to companies, stripping out all the pesky ideas about society benefiting for moving all the benefits over to the companies using OSS. Free/libre softwsre and OSS are technically the same, but the idea behind the licenses are so very different: Free/libre software wsnt to give rights to end users, OSS cares about the freedom of the developers between yourself and end users – giving the companies the right to commercialize your work for you.
The moment you stop caring for the social and societal aspects of software, it becomes OK to host on a proprietary service. That was never the case for the free/libre parts of our community. Those projects tend to shun proprietary services like discord, github and stuff. Pretty old fashined… not very sexy for young devs:-(
Hell yeah! Great perspective.
If you’re talking about companies, safety, SLA/SLO agreements, security, lack of admin overhead…lots of reasons.
Lots of companies and projects are leaving GitHub because of the Copilot being shoved down everyone’s throats though.
Why aren’t more people using Codeberg
From my biased perspective here on the Fediverse, basically everybody who isn’t profoundly behind the curve is already on Codeberg.
My customer decided to host their shit there ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Github has been otherwise fairly alright under Microsoft until recently.
I feel like it’s been going downhill since 2019, given the point in time Microsoft acquired them was in 2018 I’d say people have just not wanted to acknowledge the trajectory. (That included me.)
Every big feature since 2019 has been enterprise slop, in my opinion:
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In 2019 they announced dependabot. What’s wrong with it?
It’s not configurable, rather than allowing a universal mechanism so people can feed dependencies into it via some custom tool that e.g. generates a standardized listing, it only supports the popular package managers. This is exactly what big enterprise wants since they only care about their super old codebases and what those use, not any upcoming stack.
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In 2019, they also announced security advisories. What’s wrong with it?
That Github to this day in 2026, hasn’t bothered to add the most basic feature that regular FOSS projects would need to handle security reports, which is confidential issues. Instead, the assumption seems to be you’re either a big enterprise that already has some dedicated security team with their own email infrastructure, or Microsoft doesn’t care about you.
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In 2020, they announced Github’s Codespaces. What’s wrong with it?
It makes the UI more complicated and as far as I know leaves buttons for it everywhere that can’t be turned off even if you don’t want it. And it’s a vendor lock-in feature that’s expensive, the average small FOSS project will neither have the budget to use it nor likely care to do so.
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Then of course the entire AI slop spin since 2025 ish.
There’s probably more, but those are the big ones that I’ve noticed that made me suspicious of where this was going.
You’re not wrong.
But … it’s also been convenient and largely free for most use cases and has had a better feature set then most alternates without having to host your own.
If you could host your own Gitlab was the choice.
The reliability issues of late is what is making most people actually contemplate moving.
I’ve moved to Codeberg. It works well enough for me.
Gitlab is trying hard to ruin the software so beware of that.
Yeah, things have been shook hard as of late.
My organization ( a Fortune 500) is taking serious consideration into extricating from GitHub, which is going to be a huge task.
Gitlab was our obvious first choice because a few projects we have an instance of it, and it works well … but they’re trying to do the same shit.
Most of our developers are fine to just use git and many of us do that these days.
My dev box has a 100% uptime if I turn it on, and IT backs it up.
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You’re the first I’ve ever heard say this. (Or read in this case)
I’ve just been freeing up my phone and life from all major data siphons. Social media has been gone for years, but then news about LinkedIn getting way worse with data (which it’s already sucked) and sharing now with Amazon, is just BS so I’ve closed it.
One REALLY annoying thing I’ve personally noticed and can’t confirm but feel it; all the companies with jobs postings basically collect all these applicants data without ever hiring. It’s another dataset that can be monetized, so now companies can make money off everyone without much effort. Through some efforts I’ve read online as all as gone through myself, we all know there job market sucks-especially tech, but I guess I never considered why there are so so many posted jobs still until now.
Fuck them all!!
