even aside from this, their reliability has been absolutely terrible since they took it over. it's down so often we had to setup slack notifications directly to the devs to try to take some of the pressure off our ops teams.
they must be migrating it to hyper-v or something. brutal.
It was much better than the closed source SourceForge which existed before it. A lot of small projects dont have the energy to self host. Plus for small projects the barrier of entry is an issue. I recently found a typo in an error message in Garage but since they run their own Forgejo instance and OpenID never really became a thing I never created a PR.
It is first now with Codeberg there is a credible alternative. Of course large projects do not have this issue, but for small projects Github delivered a lot if value.
Well - my perspective is the KDE project, which has a team of capable admins who take care of hosting. The project has always been more or less self-hosted (I remember SUSE providing servers) and even provided hosting for at least one barely associated project, Valgrind. I think Valgrind bugs are still on KDE Bugzilla.
It's admittedly not really practical for most projects, but it could be for some large ones - Rust, for example.
I mostly work on PostgreSQL which has always selfhosted but PostgreSQL is a big project, for smaller projects it is much less practical. Even for something decently large like Meson I think the barrier would have been too big.
But, yes, projects like Rust could have selfhosted if they had wanted to.
KDE uses Phabricator, or at least did the last time I contributed. Worked pretty well in the collaboration aspect for submitting a change, getting code owners to review and giving feedback. I was able to jump in as a brand new contributor and get a change merged. The kind of change that would have been a PR from a fork in GitHub.
However I got the distinct feeling the whole stack would not fit as well into an enterprise environment, nor would the tooling around it work well for devs on Windows machines that just want to get commits out there. It's a perfect fit for that kind of project but I don't think it would be a great GitHub replacement for an enterprise shop that doesn't have software as it's core business
KDE uses GitLab now, the change-over was mostly in 2020 with some less commonly used features staying on Phabricator a while longer.
I use a self-hosted GitLab instance in a commercial setting (with developers on Linux and Windows) as well. It's a software department of a non-software company. Fairly small. The person or persons in charge of GitLab have set up some pretty nifty time-savers regarding CI and multi-repo changes - I'd prefer a monorepo, but the integration makes it bearable.
We still use KDE's bugzilla. One of the reasons that Vagrind was initially developed was to help with KDE back when many developers didn't really understand how to use new and delete.
These days sourceware.org hosts the Valgrind git repo, buildbot CI and web site. We could also use their bugzilla. There isn't much point migrating as long as KDE can put up with us.
> It is first now with Codeberg there is a credible alternative.
There is no credible alternative, because 3rd party hosting of the canonical repo is a bad idea to start with. By all means use 3rd party hosting for a more public-facing interaction, but its about time that developers understand that they need to host their own canonical repos.
Strong agree on this. I think a lot of people who've entered software development in the past decade or so don't appreciate just how bad the available options were when Github launched.
If you blanch at the thought of a one line in a pull request just wait until you see what Sourceforge looked like, release download pages where you had to paying keen attention to what you clicked on because the legit download button was surrounded by banner ads made to look like download buttons but they instead take you to a malware installer. They then doubled down on that by wrapping Windows installers people published with their own Windows installer that would offer to install a variety of things you didn't want before the thing you did.
To me, GitHub only makes sense as a social media site for code. If you are publishing to GitHub with no intent to be open in your code, development process, and contributor roster, then I don't see the point of being on GitHub at all.
Because it's not like their issue tracker is particularly good. It's not like their documentation support is particularly good. It's not like their search is particularly good. It's CI/CD system is bonkers. There are so many problems with using GitHub for its own sake that the only reason I can see to be there is for the network effects.
So, with that in mind, why not just setup a cheap VPS somewhere with a bare git repo? It'll be cheaper than GitHub and you don't have to worry about the LLM mind virus taking over management of your VPS and injecting this kind of junk on you.
Very true. We have a private git repository running on a server that serves as our master. Works fine for us. We backup to GitHub. But it isn't used in any way in the dev workflow
I'm a bit confused what you mean. I have to use GitLab for work and don't see much difference. Some UI elements look a bit more complex than on GH but other than that it's working the same way. Less buggy as well.
Personally I host forgejo for my private apps and have had no issues with that either.
It really is… I’ve worked with Gitlab for years and moving to GitHub was like a breath of fresh air, everything is much less cluttered. Not saying it’s perfect, but GitHub just feels simpler
I've been thinking about this. If you have any kind of home network with attached storage at all, setting your local Git to just use that seems like a logical step.
And then if you're still paranoid do a daily backup to like Dropbox or something.
Forgejo is super easy to set up on a 1-2 core vm. Make a compose file and put caddy in front for tls. the whole thing is less than 50 lines and costs about $10-$15 a month.
self hosted Gitea is my recommendation. has everything one needs and is super lean and resource saving. you can run it easily on a 1GB VPS - I even ran it for a while on 512MB.
Funny that people said the exact same thing back when GitHub was originally acquired [0], I wonder how many actually went through with their words and ditched it. I bet GitHub has more users today than ever before though.
Just speaking anecdotally, Codeberg today feels like the Gitlab of yesteryear, except that Codeberg has projects on it. Someone who is contributing to open source will eventually need to create a Codeberg account.
The top comment of the linked thread ("If Microsoft shares SSL certs with NSA they could do MITM attacks") is something that I find much more likely today than back in 2018.
What profitability? I'm pretty sure GitHub is a loss leader to push people to Azure and cloud services. I also don't know anyone who actually uses GitHub as a social network even though it ostensibly has such features.
The social features were GH's early secret sauce that contributed heavily to its stickiness and why it eventually dominated. IMO.
I should have said "will dent whatever profitability." I'm not sure it exists either. From the outside, it would seem crazy that it wouldn't be profitable with all the Enterprise stuff (and it's not like you can throw 10k engineers at whatever GH is doing).
