Sure, I know a lot of projects have been on GH since before MS bought it, but they’ve owned it for quite a while now, so we really should be seeing better migration out by now, no?
Codeberg is nonprofit which seems more in the spirit of the Linux ecosystem overall. GH is for-profit…
EDIT: All right, all right, I’ve gotten schooled. Thank you, O wise ones; I didn’t realize how much Microsoft literally depends on Linux, among other things. I will proceed to shut up.
GitHub has been around for nearly 2 decades and was largely considered a mostly good thing until maybe the past couple of years. Also important to add that Microsoft seems to mostly have left it alone for the first couple of years (possibly with the exception of Atom, which it left very alone)
In addition to people just generally being slow to change, changing can take quite a bit of effort for some projects for varying reasons. Many of those same projects struggle to keep up with the maintenance workload, so they’re not going to jump at the chance to add more work to their plates.
Finally, some people just don’t care. For instance, the MIT license being popular is pretty hard evidence that FOSS doesn’t necessarily mean anti-corporate, and for many users GitHub still more or less does what it says on the tin.
Though I will say if the service disruptions and ad-injection bullshit continue you’ll only see GitHub competitors grow. GitLab seems to be going after their enterprise customers with some success.
For instance, the MIT license being popular is pretty hard evidence that FOSS doesn’t necessarily mean anti-corporate, and for many users GitHub still more or less does what it says on the tin.
I’m pretty sure that MIT license is that popular out of ignorance, instead of an informed decision to allow corporate to steal and make money out of their code.
Respectfully disagree. I can only speculate why other developers choose MIT. But for small and medium-sized projects, a more restrictive license is unlikely to protect them from this scenario anyway. And if that’s true, one could argue it’s better to go down a road where corporate sponsorships are potentially more likely.
Personally, I often choose MIT because I don’t care who uses my code and for what, and I’d prefer that it be easy to borrow from. I used to be concerned about how my code was used, but over the years I’ve developed a strong dislike for copyright as a concept in general so I fight it how I can. Some of my projects are so simple that even MIT seems like overkill. In those cases I use the Unlicense.
Atom is back to life, kinda, there’s a fork of it called Pulsar that’s actually really pretty good
Two main reasons: history and network effects.
GitHub was an independent company for a decade that provided a vastly superior service to what it replaced, primarily SourceForge. And it was free for FOSS projects, while charging for closed ones.
The improvements paid for by the closed source customers trickled out to everyone. So, it became the best place for FOSS developers, large and small. And as more people moved to GH, the more reason there was to move to it.
Of course, it was constantly bleeding money and eventually had to do something. That ended up being selling to MS.
There was a lot of trepidation about this, but for the first few years they not only kept their promise about supporting FOSS, but actually made it better by allowing small private repos to get many of the services that were previously gated for open FOSS or paid repos.
And the alternatives were stil not as good, and just as importantly didn’t have the user networking that GH does.
Now, some FOSS people are starting to look elsewhere, Codeberg, self-hosted Forgejo, and others. They have come a long way and are nearing feature parity, particularly for smallish projects. But the network effects of discovery and reputation are strong, and GH still provides a few more useful features.
I’ve moved my private repos to self hosted Forgejo, but my public ones are still on GH as push mirrors. I’m not ready to give up the discoverability and Mac/Windows CI runners that I can get from GH for free. I hope to be able to some day, but not yet.
Btw, there are some CI runners on Codeberg, but they’re not well advertised, and not as feature-rich
Just to give some relevant information: Git, the major program behind GitHub, has been developed by Linus Torvals. The license allowed the free use of git until today. Some people took git and built a web application around - GitHub was born. Sure they added some features, but the engine was git! In 2018 these “creators” of GitHub sold their product to Microsoft. They gave a s**t on the community and what may happen afterwards.
Open Source projects get lots of free features for being on GitHub. Nobody else is beating that offering at current.
What are those free features? Why doesn’t Codeberg have it?
Because running servers costs money. The project I work on gets donations towards it’s CI costs and it’s not insignificant.
Free github actions
- CI runners - GH offers free CI runners for a variety of OSs. I can automatically test my code on Linux/Mac/Windows for free on GH. No one else offers that because it is very expensive. You need windows licenses and Apple hardware. And Codeberg only offers it on Linux after a back and forth discussion. Plus, while simple GH CI Actions move to Forgejo Actions pretty easily, more complex ones require a complete rewrite.
- Better issue tracking - FJ’s issue tracking is pretty good, and perfetcly fine for small projects, but GH’s is better.
- Better CLI -
fjis decent and improving, butghis better - Better project pages - Codeberg Pages is decent and improving, but GH Pages are better.
- Lots of other small things - Codeberg is decent and improving, GH is better.
For most people, myself included, the only thing that really matters are the CI runners. But that is also the one thing that costs the most to support.
Why aren’t all the reddit users over here yet? Consolidation and ease of use. Big number make brain happy.
Lazyness? Its why Amazon is such a success. Too difficult to do online search. Amazon is convinient.
You are mistaken, they all are, what’s left is bots talking between them
Ha, if only that were the truth. I keep preaching over there and telling people to check out /r/RedditAlternatives, at least, so I like to think that I’ve moved at least one person over, which makes it all worthwhile.
Inertia. And GitHub was actually good, despite MS ownership. Until recently.
It really is quite amazing how fast its gone completely to shit. The site is so fucking slow so much of the time. I’ve started moving my projects one-by-one to a Forgejo instance I control, the main hurdle is just updating actions workflows to work there.
In hindsight the period 2015-2022 was a kind of a golden age for Microsoft.
They actually made (well, acquired) some good software, and even not-so-good stuff like Azure had a point of existing.Of course it all went downhill very quickly.
There was a brief time there where I thought even Xbox was doing pretty good shit. Backwards compatibility and the Xbox Adaptive Controller come to mind. With the latter especially, I feel like that was a lot of R&D for a relatively niche product. Nowadays, idk wtf they’re doing over there besides constantly fucking up.
The case of free CI/CD, visibility, and network effects are already said. So I wanna offer an anectode: someone I know is a graphic designer, who maintains a project that curate icons. Moving to Codeberg means he has to interact with PRs using the CLI, which he really does not have familiarity with. GitHub OTOH has a simple desktop client that allows natively switching across PRs, approving then in the UI, etc. It’s really, really convenient for someone who’s not a developer.
I think Forgejo-based platforms will need to work on a very good GUI client, in order to attract less technical contributors.
Why doesn’t the web client fit their needs?
The idea is to download the “project” down to a local machine, switch to the contributors’ PRs, and have those new files natively show up in their directories. Then they can use local software i.e. Inkscape/Illustrator/etc to edit those SVGs and commit the appropriate changes. This is really not feasible with a forge’s web UI.
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It’s disappointing yet unsurprising to read the recurring answers, namely :
- cost
- incumbency
precisely because it’s absolutely avoidable and a well known strategy. It’s so well known that it’s precisely why Micro$lop bought Github in the first place. People are there and the free tiers is enough to get the long tail.
Meanwhile since that strategy happened people who consider smart enough should know the genuine cost behind this : it’s a TRAP. Plain and simple, you get there and you get STUCK there.
So… yes it takes some sweat and even some money to leave the trap … but if you care about freedom, as most free software or open-source developers might, then it’s aligned with your value.
For some people, they don’t actually care about the politics of FOSS; they want a portfolio for employers.
Arguably the biggest contributor to the Linux ecosystem is Red Hat, a for-profit company that offers its technologies to the Israeli military among other things. The biggest contributor to the Linux kernel is Red Hat, while the second biggest is Meta. The Linux ecosystem is not inherently nonprofit!
Oh… shoot… TIL, thanks!
Why do you make the argument that Red Hat is the biggest contributor?Searching Linux contributor breakdown by organization puts them tied for 3rd at ~7%.https://commandlinux.com/statistics/linux-kernel-contributors-lines-of-code-statistics/
Don’t get me wrong. Intel leading the corporate contributions is worse. lolAll-time contributions are led by Red Hat at 15%. Many top organizational contributors guilty of profiting from the genocidal industrial complex. Maybe TempleOS was the true alternative.
In the first link, look at the parameters in the link. It is for last 365 days. If you take all time, it is Red Hat.
To be explicit: I don’t like Red Hat.
I see. Ty
Pardon, I remembered it so from a graph I saw a few months ago. Perhaps I misremembered, or perhaps things changed since then
You were right. Red Hat leads all time.
All the major organizational contributors are guilty of profiting from genocide. TempleOS might be the one true alternative.
This is also a reason why some are against RedHat distributions (eg Fedora) or products (systemd, pulse audio). If you don’t like to support the company and have an alternative, take the alternative.
Did you download the source code? It’s on GitHub. It’s literally on GitLab. It’s on Bitbucket with ads. It’s literally on SourceForge. You can probably find it on Savannah. Dude it’s on Azure DevOps. It’s a Codeberg project. It’s on Gitea. You can download it on Gitea. You can go to Gitea and download it. Log into Gitea right now. Go to Gitea. Dive into Gitea. You can Gitea it. It’s on Gitea. Gitea has it for you. Gitea has it for you.
That’s kind of the point of git
Is that pron. “gih-tee” or “gih-tee-uh?”
Serious answer: technical inertia and legacy reasons and most people don’t want to bother migrating established projects.
I must’ve missed this meme if this is some sort of repeat.
no, thats just what a friend of mine said genuinely. unfortunately, gh (or rather it’s features) is necessary in some cases. such as free ci, bandwidth and storage.
Momentum and time and effort to migrate.
And there’s automated workflows such as GitHub Actions and ci/cd integrations that don’t have 1-to-1 replacements, which would mean extra work (for quite strained teams of volunteers)
Additionally, as a developer on a large open source project, the community is already established on GitHub. It would be incredibly risky to move it and hope everyone comes along.
Gentoo moved: https://www.gentoo.org/news/2026/02/16/codeberg.html
Good for them, still, it’s risky, they just decided it was worth the risk
I moved my projects and yes I had to make new runners and pipelines for forgejo but it’s pretty much feature parity
Good for you, guess your setup is less complicated then.
There’s still plenty of stuff that is not a 1-to-1 drop in replacement, e.g. plenty use build previews from netlify, they have no drop-in for other providers so to get those you have to directly interact with the API instead, in a runner
Free CI/CD
Like many other social media sites it’s partially network effects.
Yeah, this is why I doubled this post on Reddit as well… though I keep encouraging people to check out Lemmy!
