[HN Gopher] Forgejo: A self-hosted lightweight software forge
___________________________________________________________________
Forgejo: A self-hosted lightweight software forge
Author : thunderbong
Score : 326 points
Date : 2025-01-19 04:15 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (forgejo.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (forgejo.org)
| andsoitis wrote:
| Q: "What is Forgego?"
|
| A: "Forgejo is a self-hosted lightweight software forge. Easy to
| install and low maintenance, it just does the job."
|
| ?
| yawaramin wrote:
| Without mentioning GitHub/BitBucket/GitLab/etc., how would you
| describe what they are?
| pookeh wrote:
| Collaborative development platform with Git repository
| hosting, CI/CD, and project management features.
| thayne wrote:
| I.e. a software forge.
|
| I do think it would be good to have a link or something to
| explain what a software forge is to people who don't know.
| int0x29 wrote:
| If it doesn't support SVN or Mercurial I don't see a need
| to try and be abstract. At a minimum it needs to use the
| word Git because that page is inscrutable.
|
| Also a features page would really help
| cortesoft wrote:
| I have been a software developer for over 30 years, and
| have never heard the term "software forge" before.
| cookiengineer wrote:
| Great! Now let's see if someone really cares enough to make
| a pull request or whether these complaints are just
| superficial to have something to complain about.
| fishgoesblub wrote:
| "A platform to host your git repositories including
| collaboration features like issues, discussions, and a
| projects page to track important parts of your code base. All
| able to run on your server local and private."
| Borealid wrote:
| "Forgejo hosts source code repositories, lets you track and
| manage issues (and review code changes), and provides all the
| integrations you'd expect with CI/CD and similar tooling."
| rmgk wrote:
| This seems to be a good tagline for a HN audience that
| kinda clicks a link blind and wants to figure out what it
| is quickly and move on. But it's unclear to me why the
| Forgejo website should care about this type of visitor?
| Being a "forge" is likely well understood by anyone that is
| interested in installing this type of software (or they
| will figure it out because of the context that linked them
| to the page). None of the features you mention is a good
| discriminator, as essentially all forges have these
| features in one form or another, so an interested use will
| have to look at the details anyway. Being: "self-hosted,
| lightweight, easy to maintain" those are very important
| quick discriminators if you are looking at this type of
| software.
| eviks wrote:
| By describing what they do (also, there is no rule you can't
| mention github)
| ycombinatrix wrote:
| Git hosts with proprietary features
| ang_cire wrote:
| Source code hosting and version control platform?
| xeonmc wrote:
| Repository Hub
| IshKebab wrote:
| I don't see why it's so critical to not mention Github. That
| would instantly convey what it is to basically everyone, and
| it doesn't mean it doesn't have its own identity or anything.
| TNorthover wrote:
| Their communication really is all over the place. Even the name
| is really awkward in English.
|
| (And yes, not everything should be forced to be English and
| it's apparently supposed to be Esperanto; but nothing else on
| the site is so that's not how most people will parse it).
| jmpavlec wrote:
| The tag line isn't the most informative. It took me a scroll or
| two on the main page to figure out its purpose. (Self hosted
| GitHub alternative). I'd suggest making that clearer earlier as
| the word "forge" in terms of software could have a variety of
| interpretations.
| baobun wrote:
| Disagree. Refering to GitHub as category-defining would be
| antithetical to the Forgejo spirit. Forgejo stands on its own.
| phantomathkg wrote:
| Disagree. Unfortunately Forge is not a well known category
| defining term. Using it as a tagline defying the purposes to
| popularize Forgego.
| szszrk wrote:
| Yet when posts online described it as an alternative/clone
| of GitHub/gitlab/gitea it was alsa received with criticism
| and complains that "what if I don't know what gitea is".
|
| Naming and creating descriptions is not trivial, I wish
| more complaints would also simply come with proposals of
| better taglines, so we can bash those ideas quickly in
| comments and cut that long feedback loop.
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| Defining itself as simply an alternative to the mainstream
| is a not a great way to makes its own identity.
|
| Imagine if Fedora presented itself as simply "an open
| source alternative to windows".
|
| Sure, that might be easier to understand for those less in
| the field, but really doesn't help it's own identity.
| rollcat wrote:
| Disagree. SourceForge was established in 1999. The term
| "software forge" was in widespread use, until Github
| started gaining mainstream attention. But the term "hub"
| doesn't necessarily always refer to the same thing - e.g.
| certain adult entertainment website is also using it.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| "Software forge" has a certain explanatory ring to it,
| but approximately nobody has any clue what SourceForge
| is, or even less, what it represented back in its heyday.
| The kids know _github_ , many don't even know the
| difference between github and git, or slighly less
| concerning, assume git is a tool from github.
| lee_ars wrote:
| > SourceForge was established in 1999. The term "software
| forge" was in widespread use...
|
| Not trying to be contentious, but I've got a 5-digit
| slashdot ID and I've never heard that phrase explicitly
| used in my entire life as a term of art by software devs,
| including at or around 1999.
|
| Definitely not saying that nobody was using the term, but
| "widespread use" is a big claim that requires some
| substantiation. It absolutely does not align with my
| lived experience of the time.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Funny that you mention /., I just mentioned it in another
| comment. Sourceforge bought /. and advertise there
| heavily - I very much associate the two.
| hinkley wrote:
| Also five digit /. id, and I would like to remind
| grandparent and upvoters that 1999 was a long fucking
| time ago. There are senior programmers who weren't born
| in 1999! Why the fuck would they know about Sourceforge?
| Was it on a special episode of the Backyardigans?
| dmd wrote:
| I've got a three digit id (/. user number 404!) and I
| agree.
| IshKebab wrote:
| You're objectively wrong in this case - look at all the
| comments in this thread. Clearly "forge" is not a well
| known category defining term.
| rollcat wrote:
| It very much used to be, before Github delivered where
| SourceForge couldn't (and still doesn't). But the history
| is still written in project names like GForge,
| FusionForge; and of course the contemporary SourceHut
| refers to itself as a "hacker's forge".
|
| I know whatever's written in Wikipedia doesn't
| necessarily have to be authoritative, but it's worth to
| check out
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forge_(software)#History
| arp242 wrote:
| Forgejo is a GitHub clone. No one can claim with a straight
| face that it's somehow completely unrelated.
| rapnie wrote:
| And then all software revision control systems / forges
| have more or less the same conceptual model for their
| platform, and just adding their specific sauce and some
| tailoring to specific needs. Some more innovative and
| deviating platforms from this more-of-the-same approach are
| Sourcehut (brutal minimalism) and Gitlab (enterprise dev
| lifecycle, process support). And then there's the general
| trend for these platforms to become one-stop-shop maximized
| lock-in walled gardens, aiming to support the entirety of
| software development practices (while they seem open and
| gratis).
| rapnie wrote:
| PS. This trend for one-stop-shop platforms will also see
| their owners start to monetize the absolute hell out of
| their existing (and often vast, take Github) 3rd-party
| vendor ecosystem via plugin marketplaces, app stores, and
| their platform API's and SDK's, which many of these
| vendors now think bring along on a free ride.
| konart wrote:
| Why Github and not Bitbucket?
| selectnull wrote:
| Maybe because Github was there first. BB was created as
| the GH clone, for mercurial repos.
| konart wrote:
| Both launched in 2008.
| selectnull wrote:
| Yes, both launched in 2008 and yet Github was launched
| first.
|
| According to this archived article[1], there is a quote
| saying: "It [BB] sports a feature-set much like Github."
| That is an indication of which one came first and was
| already a success story on the market and served as a
| blueprint for BB, which was made in its image with the
| difference of supporting mercurial, instead of git.
|
| [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110317200833/http://cod
| e.djang...
|
| (edit) forgot the link to the article
| stevekemp wrote:
| "forge" has been used since "sourceforge" if not longer to
| describe these kind of hosting-packages.
|
| I guess technically you could have called Redmine, and other
| systems at the time, forges I think the term took off after
| that.
| dotancohen wrote:
| The only time I ever see Sourceforge mentioned is in
| advertisements on /.. I think most young developers today
| have no idea what it is, if they even know what /. is.
| spookie wrote:
| Young developers are still learning the ropes :)
| hinkley wrote:
| And they have absolutely no reason to know what
| Sourceforge is.
| hinkley wrote:
| I used to use libraries that were hosted on sourceforge and I
| did not get the connection.
|
| You can't even rely on young devs to get Monty Python jokes
| anymore. Referring to a website that went away when jr devs
| were ten is a bad plan.
|
| You're old, dudes.
| dmje wrote:
| It's clearly a self hosted GitHub alternative and that's IMO
| the way to talk about it. And per other comments, it's
| obviously this once you start using it - it's basically the
| GitHub interface and it's great that it is - it's very familiar
| and easy to use
| spookie wrote:
| Calling it a software forge is the correct form. Even if the
| term isn't that well known. See:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forge_(software)
| anthomtb wrote:
| Thank you. I was trying to figure out what "forge" meant here.
|
| When I think "forge", I think a tool to turn a raw material
| into finished product. Ergo, the blacksmith tool that turns
| iron into a horseshoe.
|
| The software analogy would be turning text source code into a
| runable binary. Ergo, a compiler or an interpreter.
|
| Github and SourceForge move source code from one place to
| another. To overextend the analogy, they are more like a
| combination shop/delivery service. Source code is moved but
| never altered or transformed.
|
| Long story short, this crusty C/C++ dev thinks forge is a
| really weird term for a self-hosted, sugar-crusted Git server.
| davidkellis wrote:
| It sounds like this is trying to coin a new term. I hadn't heard
| the word forge used to mean an all-in-one git+issue
| tracker+project mgmt+etc. suite before.
| lfam wrote:
| Ever heard of Sourceforge?
| photonthug wrote:
| This is a bad association even for people that recognize it.
| Presumably there were good years but most will probably
| remember the ugly endgame with awkward UX and weird ads
| masquerading as fake download links.
| astrange wrote:
| I don't remember any era of sourceforge where it had good
| UI.
|
| I also don't remember anyone ever calling it a "software
| forge".
| coolgoose wrote:
| This is such an interesting thing of generational
| difference, since I remember sourceforge fondly before the
| crazy era of so many ads.
| rdtsc wrote:
| > Ever heard of Sourceforge?
|
| Yup! That clears it up. It's the site that serves lots of ads
| and binary packages of some old software. At least as of the
| last time I looked some years ago.
|
| Ok then, not sure I would want more things like that today to
| self host, but to each their own.
| tarxvf wrote:
| The term is decades old at this point. It doesn't seem to play
| well outside of the older open source communities, now that
| github has xeroxed.
| thayne wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forge_(software)
| oever wrote:
| That Wikipedia page was created in April 2008.
|
| > Examples of such services are: Sourceforge.net, GNU
| Savanah, Google code
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Forge_(software)&.
| ..
| prmoustache wrote:
| It is not new. I have heard that word for more than a decade
| already.
|
| I guess you need to know about the foss ecosystem to know it.
| kookamamie wrote:
| It is not new, but also not ubiquous enough to express
| something everyone understands.
|
| Trying to get "forge" across as some kind of defacto term
| just adds noise to the product description, I think.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I also knew it but look at the number of comments saying
| "what is a forge?" here - it's clearly not a good
| description.
| lamontcg wrote:
| Yeah, it is funny to read all the assertions that everyone
| knows what a "forge" refers to in the middle of all the
| threads wondering wtf a "forge" is...
| 000ooo000 wrote:
| Once upon a time, a lot of software was released/available
| through "source forge", which is pretty self-explanatory in
| the context of software publishing. Then a decade ago,
| SourceForge shit the bed and destroyed its reputation. I'd
| bet that most of the developers saying they've never heard of
| "forge" in this context have entered in the industry in that
| time.
| thunderbong wrote:
| The first time I heard that word was in Sourceforge, decades
| ago.
| thiht wrote:
| It's not new, it's outdated and they're trying to make it come
| back.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I've migrated over the years from Gogs to Gitea to Forgejo. It's
| such an excellent piece of software.
|
| 90% of the time, I can get by with hosting my personal git repos
| on an SSH server I have. When all I'm trying to do is put my
| Chezmoi repo somewhere that all my computers can access it,
| Forgejo and friends don't add much to it. For the 10% of the time
| when I want to share my code privately with some friends it's
| brilliant (and free beats a GitHub paid plan). And if I'm going
| to have it running anyway for those 10% projects, might as well
| use it as my personal git repo of record for everything else,
| too.
| KronisLV wrote:
| I initially had a Gogs install, but moved to GitLab because of
| GitLab CI and some other features. It was a bit too heavyweight
| in comparison and the updates became difficult to keep up with,
| so I eventually moved over to Gitea and Drone CI (some might
| also like the Woodpecker CI project).
|
| Honestly, my eventual next move will be either Forgejo with
| their Actions https://forgejo.org/docs/next/user/actions/ for
| CI/CD or maybe going off into the deep end with moving back to
| Jenkins.
| jcarrano wrote:
| For me GitLab CI is a reason to move _away_ from it.
| KronisLV wrote:
| Really? What'd you dislike the most about it? In my
| experience, the syntax was actually more user friendly than
| that of GitHub Actions and the file based approach a bit
| easier to carry across projects than what Jenkins and the
| likes do.
|
| Drone CI and Woodpecker both felt similar in that regard,
| at least to me. Though the docs of GitLab CI definitely
| make me consider it for group projects across an org.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I will never go back to Jenkins. It was my job across several
| shops over the last decade to keep that thing slogging along
| and I'm beyond done with it.
| antman wrote:
| For my projects I have been using Onedev
| https://github.com/theonedev/onedev which has also kanban and
| code editor
| diggan wrote:
| You run that locally on your own machine, or you host it
| yourself somewhere? If the latter, you just stop programming
| fully if the internet connection for whatever reason doesn't
| work?
|
| I'd never consider running my code editor as infrastructure,
| but certainly interesting to see that others seems to do.
| robertclaus wrote:
| I've used Github's built in VSCode for quick one-line PRs
| or docs cleanup. I'm lazy enough to appreciate the feature
| even if I would never do deeper work in it.
| antman wrote:
| I just install the container remotely, cicd remotely etc
| and code locally. My use case is the opposite, I might need
| to do some adhoc support and not have the laptop with me so
| then I use the online code editor
| evilduck wrote:
| > If the latter, you just stop programming fully if the
| internet connection for whatever reason doesn't work?
|
| It's privilege and probably a dose of luck but I can tally
| up on one hand the number of hours my house and/or phone
| hasn't had internet in the last 5 years, including total
| power losses. I also wouldn't run my editor as a hosted
| service but I can understand why someone in a similar
| position might take that gamble. It's certainly no bigger
| of a risk to me than being limited to working on something
| physically at a workplace and needing to rely on
| transportation to get there, which also has maintenance
| concerns and infrastructure congestion and reliability
| issues that have caused more productivity losses to me than
| my utility providers ever have.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Not my thing but I see why others would like it. Forgejo is
| freaking tiny by comparison resource-wise, though. It's a Go
| program that runs comfortably on a Raspberry Pi with a dozen
| other services. That alone makes it super attractive to drop
| onto any spare computer you have laying around.
| okucu wrote:
| Did you notice any important differences between gitea and
| forgejo (besides ideology)? Although it seems like forgejo has
| added actions in the meantime
| kdmtctl wrote:
| Gitea also has actions.
|
| https://docs.gitea.com/usage/actions/overview
| lolinder wrote:
| Gitea actually got actions before Forgejo did. That was
| part of what motivated Forgejo to become a hard fork
| instead of just a rebrand--there was some sort of
| disagreement about the way in which actions were rolled out
| and Forgejo decided from there to stop trying to be fully
| compatible.
|
| https://forgejo.org/2024-02-forking-forward/#the-hard-
| forkin...
| kdmtctl wrote:
| I've missed that part. AFAIK both are forked from
| nektos/act and can't be dramatically different. All this
| story is an unnecessary dichotomy for me. Still hosting
| production code on a Gitea instance and will happily pay
| a dime but didn't get why yet.
| okucu wrote:
| I probably worded that wrong, but that was my point.
| Forgejo didn't have actions for the longest time, so I was
| wondering if it "caught" up with gitea
| kstrauser wrote:
| Not a thing. I don't use actions yet, just the primary repo
| management UI. I don't know if I could tell the difference.
| HankB99 wrote:
| My first stab at running a git server was Gitlab CE (because I
| was using it at work.) I tried running it on an Atom based
| server with insufficient RAM and it just crawled. Page loads
| just timed out. I switched to Gitea and it was a breath of
| fresh air.
|
| Forgejo got to my attention when Fedora chose it for their repo
| server. My needs are pretty simple - just some centralized file
| storage of notes and some source code. I've tested a migration
| from Gitea 1.21 to Forgejo 9 and it was frictionless.
|
| I'm seriously consider migrating, but I still wonder which will
| be better supported (and suitable for free-as-in-beer use) in
| the long run.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I wonder about that, too. I'm still on Forgejo 7 which hasn't
| diverged too much from Gitea, but there's going to be a
| decision point soon.
|
| When I looked recently, it looked like Forgejo was getting
| much more activity. If I had to guess, I think it's going to
| be the leading fork.
| mroche wrote:
| Gitea 1.22 will be the last release with guaranteed
| migration support to Forgejo. The next Forgejo LTS release,
| v11, is due out around April. Migration from Gitea 1.23
| will not be supported, and since it was released in
| December those on the fence are now at the fork in the
| road.
|
| You still have time to figure out what to do, but you'll
| need to choose sooner than later.
|
| https://forgejo.org/2024-12-gitea-compatibility/
| kstrauser wrote:
| Thanks for that. I hadn't followed closely because right
| now I don't have a real desire to go back to Gitea. I'm
| glad to know that deadline to commit is coming up soon.
| nikodunk wrote:
| The Fedora Project (Linux) is switching to this, FWIW
| https://fedoramagazine.org/fedora-moves-towards-forgejo-a-un...
| synergy20 wrote:
| this is big!
| DrawTR wrote:
| can anyone share what the benefit is over using a self hosted
| repository host over a service like github/gitlab? obviously you
| get more power over the interface & such but are there truly any
| gains over using the larger platforms?
| PhilipRoman wrote:
| Aside from the whole self hosting ethos, if you are hosting it
| from a home server and you are the primary user, you will get a
| nice performance boost. Downloading binaries, cloning
| repositories will be instant. If you use CI, it will be running
| on an actual machine rather than 10% of some 2GHz cloud CPU.
|
| I regularly have to upload multi GB images to a VPS and it's
| very annoying when it takes like 10 minutes.
| Ringz wrote:
| A self hosted repository host gives you the ability to develop
| software projects without giving up privacy or locking you into
| a service you don't control.
| IshKebab wrote:
| It's very useful for companies - more control, don't have to
| host your code externally, and you don't have to pay (well,
| ish; we ended up paying for Gitlab Premium, but that doesn't
| exist for Forgejo).
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Maybe privacy, outside of that, same client, so not much.
| ranguna wrote:
| You just have to pay for the hardware instead of going onto
| crazy expensive fee schemes.
| ezst wrote:
| From the top of my head with dozens of others:
|
| - Not all projects are suitable for hosting by third parties
| (you may not want to give away the special sauce behind your
| wannabe next trillion dollar company, or you may be handling
| sensitive or confidential data like medical records, etc)
|
| - You are immune to the trending process recently referred to
| as enshittification that consists of providers in a
| consolidated market like this one giving you an increasingly
| worse experience to compel you into more expensive plans, i.e.
| you gain independence and control
|
| - It might be a competitive advantage to your business to still
| have the lights on when inevitably the centralised platform
| becomes unavailable to most (think of trading and events like
| crowdstrike)
| homebrewer wrote:
| Downtime when you can afford it (for us it's in the middle of
| the night, and very rarely), not in the middle of the working
| day when GitHub fucks up yet again.
| seymon wrote:
| Is fogejo the platform that codeberg uses?
| openplatypus wrote:
| Yes
| remux wrote:
| Who owns the Forgejo domains and trademarks? > The Forgejo
| domains are in the custody of the non-profit Codeberg e.V..
|
| e.g. https://forgejo.org/faq/
| stop50 wrote:
| And vice versa. Codeberg is the official host of the sourcecode
| tmountain wrote:
| Looks interesting but I'm not quite sure exactly what it is based
| on what I am seeing on the front page.
| blacklight wrote:
| I did my Github -> self-hosted Gitlab -> Gitea -> Forgejo journey
| over the years, and I haven't looked back.
|
| Forgejo is great and it's probably going to become even greater
| once federation is done (having distributed forks and PRs across
| multiple instances solves the fragmentation problem of self-
| hosted solutions).
|
| And I lost my trust in Gitea once it spun off a for-profit branch
| backed by VC money (which was exactly the reason why it was
| forked into Forgejo).
|
| The only thing I lost from Gitlab is the out-of-the-box CI/CD
| platform. But I could migrate my pipelines to Drone CI and
| trigger them via webhooks. Just keep in mind that, depending on
| the complexity of your Gitlab pipelines, this may not always be
| an option. Anyway, for me hosting a Gitlab server that hogged up
| 5GB of RAM to serve a couple of small projects was a big no-no.
| Forgejo takes 500MB of RAM at peak.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| From the FAQ, for'dZe.jo, to my midwestern ear, "4 Jay yo",
| Esperantese for Forge. A fork of Gitea [0] but managed via a non
| profit, no premium upsells, all freely licensed [1](GPL) etc.
|
| Good to see their community outreach is via Matrix and Mastadon.
| My kind of nerds.
|
| Apparently this is what Codeberg is running out, if you click .
| Looks like gitea/github to me, nothing wrong with that [2] source
| code is available from the little branch icon in the top right
| corner, hosted on codeberg which TIL is a forgejo instance [3]
|
| [0] https://forgejo.org/2024-02-forking-forward/
|
| [1] https://forgejo.org/2024-08-gpl/
|
| [2] https://v10.next.forgejo.org/explore/repos
|
| [3] https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo
| xena wrote:
| It's more like "forge place" in the same way that kafejo (cafe)
| is "coffee place".
| Karliss wrote:
| That's English for you, same word is usable for describing
| action, place and the furnace.
| colanderman wrote:
| It's actually more like "distant gay" (and would be
| pronounced with a hard "g") because it's a (presumably
| deliberate) misspelling of _forgejo_.
| asddubs wrote:
| I was kind of passively wondering the other day what the main
| differences were between gitea and forgejo at this point, since
| they've been separate projects for a bit now. It seems there
| aren't any direct comparisons I could find, though.
| geek_at wrote:
| > no premium upsells
|
| So.. like gitea?
|
| From my understanding the fork was done because gitea created a
| company to build custom-features for companies if they ask. Not
| really many indicators for a rugpull
| ffsm8 wrote:
| Fork timeline Gogs, inspired by GitHub -
| back when it still had the original old UI ->
| Gitea, forked with minor drama (claimed that they forking
| because the project wasn't maintained, which was untrue -
| they just didn't want to merge their PR) ->
| Gitea goes commercial, making previous community
| contributions into essentially free labor for their profit
| ----> Forgejo forks Gitea (and never actually does anything
| new afaik, it's just Gitea under another name, while taking
| money too)
|
| So, the original comment is spot on: the design is basically
| old GitHub, copied back in early 2010 by Gogs devs
|
| Gitea did add several useful features over the years, which I
| think rationalized their pivot (vertical CI integration etc),
| but that's just my opinion as a Gogs user that doesn't need
| them.
| Macha wrote:
| The money that Forgejo takes is EUR60/month in Liberapay
| donations, and some grants to develop federation features
| so I think it's a little disingenuous to compare it to
| Gitea's pivot to open core and hosted cloud service.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| How viable is gogs right now? I see that there is some
| activity on the repo but I guess there's no reason to not
| use Gitea or Forgejo?
| ffsm8 wrote:
| I actually went back to it after the gitea pivot and was
| surprised that it actually performed way better on my
| rpi.
|
| But ymmv, I'm sure it's mostly because of how resource
| constrained it is.
|
| It does what I want is completely FOSS and low
| maintenance. Perfect for my home setup, but different
| people will have different preferences
| yencabulator wrote:
| Plot twist: Gogs was _never_ viable.
|
| > In my point of view, as long as no deadlock..data race
| is unavoidable.
|
| https://github.com/gogs/gogs/issues/613
|
| > The payload comes from request somehow is not always in
| a clean format, so we have to preform a clean operation
| to remove unless characters: func
| cleanCommand(cmd string) string { i :=
| strings.Index(cmd, "git") if i == -1 {
| return cmd } return cmd[i:]
| }
|
| https://blog.gopheracademy.com/advent-2015/ssh-server-in-
| go/
|
| https://github.com/gogs/gogs/issues/7777
| huijzer wrote:
| > (and never actually does anything new afaik, it's just
| Gitea under another name, while taking money too)
|
| What evidence do you have for this strong claim? I'm using
| Forgejo and contributed to the docs once. It seems to me
| real work is happening in Forgejo. A lot from what I can
| see is stabilizing infrastructure and fixing bugs. Seems
| perfectly reasonable to me.
| remram wrote:
| > Gitea goes commercial, making previous community
| contributions into essentially free labor for their profit
|
| Gitea (like Gogs) is under MIT license, which allow
| commercial applications. Is the new expectation of open
| source that we grant everyone license terms that they
| shouldn't use? I don't understand this at all.
|
| Forgejo is under GPL-3.0, which also allows commercial
| applications. Should we expect the Forgejo community to
| start name-calling any company that would use Forgejo
| according to its license terms?
| bramhaag wrote:
| > and never actually does anything new afaik, it's just
| Gitea under another name, while taking money too
|
| This is really unfair to the many people who spend their
| free time working on Forgejo, please stop spreading
| nonsense. They have worked hard on "boring" improvements
| like translations, accessibility and proper unit and e2e
| testing, but also UI improvements, federation support, and
| other genuinely new features (asset quotas, wiki search,
| ...). Take a look for yourself:
| https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/pulls.
|
| Regarding the money part, Forgejo is not monetized. It is a
| true FOSS project (recently re-licensed as GPLv3), not
| open-core like Gitea. The only funding they receive is from
| donations and grants, they are not selling a product.
| mort96 wrote:
| The pricing page (https://about.gitea.com/pricing/) talks
| about paywalled "Enhanced enterprise-level features and
| experiences". Are you sure that doesn't count as a premium
| upsell?
| yoavm wrote:
| Checking out https://v10.next.forgejo.org/explore/repos , the
| main thing I notice in comparison to GitHub is how fast this is.
| I wish GitHub was so fast.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Now picture it running on-prem !
| homebrewer wrote:
| There are only five pages of repositories there, so it's no
| surprise it responds quickly. We've been running gitea for
| several years, and when you put enough data into it
| (repositories, issues, comments, etc) it doesn't feel as fast
| anymore, although most pages still render within 500 ms. For
| example, opening large-ish issues can stall the server for a
| second or two (it reports rendering time in the footer, so I'm
| sure it's the server).
| yoavm wrote:
| I don't know if that's the whole story? Sure, GitHub has more
| data to process (and way more compute), but even when
| switching between tabs within one repo (going from code to
| pull requests, for example) GitHub is still much slower even
| though its query shouldn't be affected by the number of
| repositories it has.
| zipy124 wrote:
| Click on any repo from: https://codeberg.org/explore/repos
|
| It's very speedy. Not as much as sourcehut, but you get a
| nicer UI. Github is becoming slow enough to meaningfully
| detract from productivity.
| bsdice wrote:
| I have around 1.2 GB of compressed git commits on disk, still
| fast on an ancient Intel E3 1275-v6 with 64 GB of RAM and 2
| TB Intel P3520.
|
| Version 10 also now without any startup errors due to
| slightly wrong sqlite database structure.
|
| Together with vscodium a joy to use.
| lloeki wrote:
| An interesting aspect of Forgejo is ongoing work on forge
| federation
|
| https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/59#issuecomment-...
|
| In an ideal world github and gitlab would also support
| federation, but I guess that's probably not going to happen.
|
| An alternative solution in the problem space would be going p2p,
| e.g https://radicle.xyz/
| franga2000 wrote:
| It's a shame "federation" these days basically just means
| "implement activitpub". So many projects get caught up in the
| complicated mess of mapping their data model onto AP, debating
| about how exactly to map things and writing standard extension
| proposals....
|
| Useful federation between Forgejo instances could be solved
| with little more than OIDC and a few webhooks (cross-instance
| collaboration, forking, and PRs). Nobody needs federation
| between Forgejo and Mastodon - what would that even mean??
| FireInsight wrote:
| I tend to agree that ActivityPub seems pretty horrifying to
| work with (as an outsider). At least it works, though, and is
| implemented by a large amount of different projects and not
| owned by any single one.
| diggan wrote:
| > seems pretty horrifying to work with (as an outsider).
|
| As someone who both made my own implementation + hacked on
| others, what was/seemed to be the horrible parts? It's a
| pretty simple standard that is basically RSS with some
| added stuff (very simplified of course, before I got
| jumped) for facilitating the federation parts.
| diggan wrote:
| > So many projects get caught up in the complicated mess of
| mapping their data model onto AP, debating about how exactly
| to map things and writing standard extension proposals....
|
| Well, you either use an existing standard so you can federate
| with existing implementations, or you come up with a new
| standard and ask others to implement that. Seems they chose
| the simpler way, thankfully.
|
| > Useful federation between Forgejo instances could be solved
| with little more than OIDC and a few webhooks (cross-instance
| collaboration, forking, and PRs).
|
| What about federation between more software than just your
| own? Once you've done those things, you basically end up with
| another spec (but informal instead of formal) that others
| also need to implement. So instead of going the informal way,
| they aim for the formal one. That does sound appropriate to
| me.
|
| Slightly besides the point, but for someone who dealt more
| with decentralized/distributed systems than bloated
| authentication systems, it seems both simpler and easier to
| map+implement ActivityPub than implement OIDC+"a few
| webhooks", but that might just be because of my familiarity.
|
| I'll say that ActivityPub is a pretty simple standard though,
| compared to what's out there.
| adastra22 wrote:
| When I saw "federated github", sharing activity feeds is
| not what I had in mind. I thought maybe making pull
| requests across instances or things like that.
| bramhaag wrote:
| Forgejo is implementing ForgeFed [1], which is an AP
| extension that supports creating PRs, issues, etc. across
| instances.
|
| [1] https://forgefed.org/
| vaylian wrote:
| > Useful federation between Forgejo instances could be solved
| with little more than OIDC and a few webhooks (cross-instance
| collaboration, forking, and PRs).
|
| That would only solve the problem of "I don't have an account
| on this forge yet". The much more relevant problem is
| identity + reputation. With ActivityPub-based federation you
| can use your domain-bound identifier to contribute to various
| projects across servers and gain reputation and trust. If we
| use OIDC, then it is a lot less clear if the server, you
| authenticate with, is hosting the real franga2000.
| plagiarist wrote:
| It's already awkward just between Lemmy and Mastodon.
|
| I guess Lemmy could be in the form of issues on the repo and
| Mastodon would be thumbs up emojis and/or "starring" the
| repo.
|
| Yeah I wish there was a different protocol if we are jamming
| everything on top of it.
| DicIfTEx wrote:
| The federation page on the Forgejo Web site
| (https://forgejo.org/2023-01-10-answering-forgejo-
| federation-...) is out of date and most of the links don't
| work. They also used to publish annual progress reports until
| 2023 (on a Web site that no longer seems to be accessible: http
| s://web.archive.org/web/20240830030315/https://forgefrie...).
|
| Although the last mention of federation in a monthly update was
| in October, where they stressed that federation was and is
| their 'highest priority'.[0]
|
| [0]: https://forgejo.org/2024-10-monthly-
| update/#:~:text=Forgejo%...
| jwildeboer wrote:
| FYI: Just last Friday there was a call/meeting to coordinate
| and build out the federation efforts in Forgejo. More work is
| coming and more help is appreciated! There will be a
| presentation at FOSDEM on this topic and there is a matrix
| room dedicated to Forgejo Federation.
| 3np wrote:
| I would expect Gitea to merge back in federation functionality
| once it's stable if they get some help with it. IIRC that
| initiative started in gitea and I'm not aware of that level of
| animosity or divergence of goals between the two?
| imiric wrote:
| Over the years I've come to the conclusion that all these UIs
| on top of Git make little sense. Git itself is already
| distributed, which goes beyond federation. Exposing a Git repo
| over the network is trivial with HTTP or SSH. It supports code
| review workflows via email, though I really like the approach
| of storing reviews inside the repo itself via something like
| git-appraise[1]. Integrating it with CI/CD pipelines _can_ be
| simple, if the pipeline can be triggered by pushes.
|
| Instead we've created these centralized UIs over Git, and are
| trying to get them to integrate with one another. This seems
| backwards to me since Git is already decentralized.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/google/git-appraise
| KingMob wrote:
| I suspect the reason is the same as the use of local git GUIs
| and TUIs; git has a terrible CLI, so everyone uses its
| plumbing, but not its porcelain.
| lee_ars wrote:
| Yeah, there's a reason why stuff like the git manpage
| generator (https://git-man-page-generator.lokaltog.net/) is
| funny, and it's because git's CLI doesn't have a learning
| curve. It has a learning brick wall that you smash your
| face into.
| KingMob wrote:
| Hehe. Yeah, I can't think of another tool that's
| simultaneously popular enough, and painful enough, to
| warrant a site like https://ohshitgit.com
| HankB99 wrote:
| Perhaps there's a similar site for 'ffmpeg'.
|
| The link you posted looks pretty helpful. I guess my
| needs for "interesting" git operations are low because
| I've never felt the need to move beyond the CLI. (Mostly,
| that is. I do click the colored bars in VS Code to stage
| commits and then commit from the command line.)
|
| Occasionally I need to search for help when I screw
| something up. More often the solution is in the git
| warning message ("You need to 'git pull' before you can
| push" - paraphrasing.)
| stavros wrote:
| > the git manpage generator is funny
|
| It would be funny if I didn't mistake it for an actual
| git manpage.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| I needed something like this 16 years ago at work to manage
| shared code, tickets, and code review of private code across
| a team of engineers. Code review for formal quality assurance
| was the most important need. I started with trac, then
| Phabricator, then GitHub enterprise. I just checked out git
| appraise to see how my nuclear and mechanical engineer
| friends would like it, and from what I see, I'm guessing they
| would not. We were using eclipse back then so maybe if that
| eclipse UI plugin still works it could work.
| yencabulator wrote:
| There's value in quickly browsing files of a project without
| needing to clone it first -- especially for quickly linking
| others to specific lines, API docs linking to implementation,
| etc. That needs to expose content at every commit, for stable
| links. So, some sort of a "web git viewer" is very useful.
|
| Unfortunately, the more minimal read-only ones have ended up
| with far worse UX than the Github clones, or are a scary
| tangle of shell scripts and/or C. :-(
|
| (Anyone want to collaborate on a Rust-based read-only git
| browsing web UI that aims for great usability? I'm all in, I
| want one. I know how to make it handle search etc, I'm not
| great at wrangling CSS to will or getting navigation right.)
| zufallsheld wrote:
| Gitlab has experimental support for activitypub:
| https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/blob/v17.1.0-ee/doc/d...
|
| See also: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-
| org/-/epics/11247#why
| lvncelot wrote:
| Really looking forward to the federation, hosting Forgejo for
| my own stuff while having discoverability/issue tracking with
| other instances would be the best of both worlds. As of now I'm
| mirroring stuff across self-hosted
| forgejo/github.com/gitlab.com where the forgejo instance is
| just part of my self-hosting hobby and not "load bearing".
|
| I think that Gitlab Cells[1] might go into the same direction,
| there is a mention of federation in the design document.
|
| [1]
| https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/architectur...
| criticalfault wrote:
| The project is amazing
|
| The name of the project is horrible
| thiht wrote:
| I wish they would have chosen a better name. Honestly if I have
| to install a Git server one day I'm gonna install Gitea, not a
| tool I can't even pronounce.
|
| Names are important, this is why I also don't use DuckDuckGo.
|
| The reasons for forking from Gitea were also a bit weak in my
| opinion.
| runiq wrote:
| That's a weak reason and you know it.
| tasuki wrote:
| I think they don't.
| homebrewer wrote:
| It might not be a very strong reason, but quite enough to
| pick the original project which also has more development
| effort behind it (and is still used by Blender FWIW, I don't
| think they have any plans of migrating). I understand your
| first language is German. Figures. The name is
| unpronounceable and feels weird to me also. If we ever
| migrate from gitea (although I currently see no reason to do
| it), I'll have to pick some generic term and introduce it to
| others under that name.
| rmgk wrote:
| > I understand your first language is German. Figures.
|
| I assume your argument is: "Everyone who had to learn
| English as a second language is so used to completely
| random pronunciation that they won't complain about
| anything anymore".
| homebrewer wrote:
| It's just that German is close enough to Esperanto that
| I'm personally not particularly interested in what a
| German speaker thinks about the name. Ask a
| Mandarin/Japanese/Arabic/Ewe/Telugu/etc. speaker what
| they think.
|
| (My first language is quite far away from both English
| and Esperanto, probably should have mentioned that in the
| original message.)
| rmgk wrote:
| Maybe, but the pronunciation of the forge part is
| essentially just the English one (at least much, much
| closer to an attempted German pronunciation).
|
| The jo part is close to German though, so maybe this is
| why it's not too bad for someone who knows English and
| German. And everyone else gets to dislike at least some
| part of it :-)
| thiht wrote:
| I know. But I don't want to use something with a naming
| sounding weird that I actively hate, especially when there
| are alternatives with a better name.
| tasuki wrote:
| > Names are important, this is why I also don't use DuckDuckGo.
|
| You won't use DuckDuckGo because of the name? DuckDuckGo is so
| tricky to write on mobile that I copy pasted from your comment,
| but that doesn't stop me from using it. For me, googlability of
| names is important, but otherwise I don't care.
|
| I'm really curious about your reasoning. Does it offend your
| aesthetic sensibilities? Do you think people who would choose
| such a name can't be trusted with search? Or something else
| entirely?
| homebrewer wrote:
| Use ddg.co on mobile.
| mkl wrote:
| Or ddg.gg - quicker to type.
| rawkode wrote:
| duck.com too
| arccy wrote:
| a phisher's dream: anything remotely related to ducks
| might be a real domain
| thiht wrote:
| It redirects to DuckDuckGo, the name is still written full
| size, and their stupid logo is still there.
|
| Give me ddg.co or duck.com with no redirect, no branding
| and no logo and I'll use it.
| zufallsheld wrote:
| So what search engine without branding and logo do you
| use?
| thiht wrote:
| Not my point, I don't care if the search engine has
| branding and a logo, I just want it to be not cringe.
| zufallsheld wrote:
| Well, there is this looking not cringey for me:
| https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite
| thiht wrote:
| > Does it offend your aesthetic sensibilities
|
| Yes. I'm completely aware it's irrational and probably a bit
| dumb, but I don't want to use something with a name I
| actively hate. Some names are "meh" or boring and that's ok.
| But for DuckDuckGo and Forgejo I have a visceral reaction
| against their name.
|
| DuckDuckGo is an even worst offender because their logo is
| ALSO dumb and terrible, and I don't want to see it.
| tasuki wrote:
| Thanks for the reply :)
| isodev wrote:
| > I can't even pronounce
|
| Even if one is somehow monolingual, forgejo is a perfectly fine
| word in English. There are even multiple ways to make it sound
| funny (forge-joe, forge-yo, etc).
| xeonmc wrote:
| for-get-hoe
| rollcat wrote:
| > a tool I can't even pronounce
|
| jazzyjackson provided the pronunciation guide in a comment
| above:
|
| > for'dZe.jo, to my midwestern ear, "4 Jay yo"
|
| It's totally OK for a project to use words from a foreign
| language. "Linux" is derived from Finnish Linus (/'li:nUs/) and
| pronounced /'lIn.@ks/, unlike the English Linus - /lajn@s/.
|
| IMHO Forgejo should have the IPA pronunciation spelled out on
| the landing page.
|
| > this is why I also don't use DuckDuckGo
|
| Just how silly "Google" sounded when it first popped up? How
| Torvalds joked that he named "git" after himself? "Bash" is a
| play on "Bourne" and "born again"? Silly names are a part of
| the hacker culture, remaining playful despite the product
| having huge impact brings color to people's lives.
| bmacho wrote:
| off: google translate English lady pronounces it as "4 Jay
| ho" with an H. That isn't how a native English speaker would
| attempt to pronounce Forgejo, is it?
| wpm wrote:
| Honestly, who cares?
|
| I pronounce it Forge-oh. I don't give a crap if it's
| "correct".
| rollcat wrote:
| Well, language nerds do, myself included. Also honestly,
| I don't care when people mispronounce words, as long as
| they can convey the meaning clearly enough.
| thiht wrote:
| > Just how silly "Google" sounded when it first popped up?
| How Torvalds joked that he named "git" after himself?
|
| I knew these examples were coming. Subjectively speaking,
| these are catchy names, which is why they work. Forjego and
| DuckDuckGo are not catchy, there's something wrong with their
| flow. Maybe they're too long or too "breaking", or maybe they
| don't work internationally (I'm French) somehow, I don't
| know. I'm not going to write a thesis on why some names don't
| work, but if someone did I would love it. Silly names are ok
| but there's a very thin line between "silly" and "annoying".
| DuckDuckGo definitely crosses it for me.
| HackOfAllTrades wrote:
| Clearly Postgres is not a good database and you will wisely use
| any other. I can see real advantages to this. It saves you so
| much effort and time. In fact, it allows you to make no effort
| at all.
| thiht wrote:
| Why? I don't think Postgres is a bad name, it's not great but
| not terrible.
| remram wrote:
| I have never heard anyone mispronounce postgres. It's even
| more straightforward than Gitea, which native-roman-language-
| speakers might pronounce "git-tay-ah"
| keb_ wrote:
| Yep, same reason I never used Google, or ffmpeg, or Debian, or
| Kubernetes.
| CGamesPlay wrote:
| Does this have a CI/CD solution? I don't see anything from
| skimming the user docs.
| throawayonthe wrote:
| they are currently developing Forgejo Actions[0], or you can
| use the existing Woodpecker[1]
|
| [0] https://forgejo.org/docs/next/user/actions/
|
| [1] https://woodpecker-
| ci.org/docs/administration/forges/forgejo
| javitury wrote:
| Yes, you need to spin a forgejo runner
| girvo wrote:
| It does, called "Actions"
|
| https://forgejo.org/docs/latest/user/actions/
| CGamesPlay wrote:
| Neat! Thanks. I see this is located in the docs between
| "comment via email" and "message templates". If the devs see
| this, perhaps adding more buzzwords would be helpful to
| discovery.
| jwildeboer wrote:
| After my struggles with trying to keep Gitlab CE (Community
| Edition) up and running (it needs a lot of CPU and memory) I
| switched to Forgejo and have not been disappointed. It runs as a
| rootless container and uses almost nothing, memory and CPU wise.
| Updating it has been a simple podman pull that JustWorks(tm).
|
| It now also runs actions that keep my static websites updated by
| running Jekyll etc.
|
| I really like it to have my own forge that can import repos,
| issues etc from other forges like GitHub, Gitlab etc. and I am
| looking forward to the upcoming ActivityPub based integration to
| the wider fediverse.
|
| Having a decentralised, but connected approach to code hosting is
| what I always wanted to have and now it's (almost) there.
| jimjimwii wrote:
| What is the status of federation support? I imagine cross-
| instance pull requests and bug reports would make collaboration
| effortless.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| Can anyone who migrated from Gitea to Forgejo explain the
| differences in usability? I understand the fork was driven by
| licensing/project ownership concerns but it's not clear to me
| from reading the website how different the end product is now. I
| believe Gitea is still being actively developed.
|
| I host a private Gitea instance (mainly to mirror all my GitHub
| stuff) so wondering if it is worth migrating.
| isodev wrote:
| They have a FAQ (https://forgejo.org/compare-to-gitea/) TLDR:
| Forgejo is free software, prioritizes security and stability
| over new features and is actively developing the federation
| module (thus working to enable communities of federated forges)
| homebrewer wrote:
| I evaluated it again a couple of weeks ago and there are
| basically no differences right now (besides a few cosmetic
| ones) because the hard fork happened just a few months ago.
| Stick on 1.22 for the time being, it's the last version from
| which Forgejo supports in-place upgrades. You'll have to
| transfer data half-manually or perform deep surgery on the
| database if you upgrade past 1.22 and then decide to switch
| forges.
|
| Although the next version of gitea should include support for
| full mirroring from GitHub (so periodic synchronization of new
| issues, PRs, etc), not just (code mirroring XOR one-off full
| copy) like it does right now. This might be of interest to you.
| bjackman wrote:
| Can anyone comment on the code review experience? (I assume
| similar to Gitea but I haven't tried either).
|
| I recently did some moderately serious code review in GitHub and
| discovered it's a baby's toy version of a code review tool. It
| seems it would be unusable for serious engineering work unless
| you totally design your source control model around making that
| work, at the expense of all the other things that influence how
| you wanna manage your history.
|
| I am mostly used to Gerrit which has a very reasonable basic
| model but a lot of rough edges and some performance issues.
|
| Suddenly I realised I don't think I've ever actually used a
| review tool I really like! I wonder if our industry is just
| getting by without one?
|
| IIRC the Gitlab one was slightly better than GitHub but I can't
| remember too much about it.
| losdanielos wrote:
| Have you tried Codelantis? It's a review tool for GitHub
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| I've used Phabricator and GitHub to design nuclear power plant
| design code... seems pretty serious. Can you tell us more about
| what's missing in your opinion from making the reviews usable?
| Curious what I've been missing out on!
| CraigRood wrote:
| I miss Phabricator. Whilst it was certainly overkill for
| personal use, the additional applications meant I could do so
| much in one place and have everything integrated. Funny how
| what we have now, including GitHub feels a step back.
| KingMob wrote:
| I got curious about why Forgejo split off from Gitea, and it
| seems like yet another case of broke FOSS creators/maintainers
| getting screwed from above (and maybe below too).
|
| From the Gitea incorporation announcement (below), it looks like
| they couldn't pay their bills as FOSS, and there were wealthy
| free-riders (which the MIT license allows).
|
| > "Over the years we have tried various ways to support
| maintainers and the project. Some ways we have tried include
| bounties, direct donations, grants, and a few others. We have
| found that while there have been many wonderful individuals, and
| a few corporations who have been incredibly generous, and we are
| so thankful for their support, _there are a few corporations
| (with revenues that are greater than some countries GDP) are
| building on Gitea for core products without even contributing
| back enhancements_. [emphasis added]
|
| I'm not a fan of Bruce Perens, but he kind of nails the problem
| when he says:
|
| > "We have a great corporate welfare program, our users are the
| richest companies in the world. Indeed, we've enabled companies
| like Google to be created.
|
| > "In contrast, if our developers aren't working for those
| companies, they probably go un-compensated."
|
| ----
|
| On the flip side, the community rebelled when the creators formed
| a company, but _not_ supposedly because they formed a company,
| but because that co held the domain and trademark. Seems like a
| small hill to die on to me, but I don 't know the details.
|
| Regardless, it looks like exhibit #187 of FOSS failing for anyone
| outside of hobbyists and FAANGs.
| Vampiero wrote:
| It's not that FOSS fails, it's that unethical corporations
| worth billions of dollars go unpunished for abusing it (because
| the law exists to protect them).
|
| FOSS is fundamentally anarchy (the good kind that shows that
| human beings are not all pieces of shit). Anarchy can't exist
| in a capitalist society because it shows people that they don't
| HAVE to live like slaves. They can live as members of tribes,
| as evolution intended for us.
|
| So as always the organism is originally healthy and successful
| until the parasite that is capitalism spreads and suffocates it
| for its own reproduction.
| dotancohen wrote:
| What is unethical about the actions of the corporations who
| use the software? They did so in accordance with the license.
| Vampiero wrote:
| The fact that Open Source is about sharing, and they don't
| share. They only take. It doesn't have to be written in
| legalese somewhere, it's the spirit of what makes Open
| Source what it is.
|
| And I'd argue that doing something for profit is also
| against the spirit of open source, but that's a different
| argument. The thing is that open source is for the most
| part an effort from hackers, hobbyists and professionals
| who want to foster a positive ecosystem for people like
| themselves. To make their passion better and simpler and
| more fun and more accessible and more interesting and safer
| and more efficient and more general... So that more people
| might fall in love with it.
|
| It's not to push a product or to convince people that they
| need it. And that sentiment comes from the fact that open
| source is the reason many people got into programming in
| the first place! Thanks to all the free resources out
| there. So they want to give back to the community. That's
| how I feel about it at least.
|
| But then again, when huge corpos contribute to open source
| it's great because they have a lot of inertia. So I think
| that's a good thing, it's a positive feedback loop. My
| previous point is not black and white, even though I am
| obviously bitter about a lot of things.
| fluoridation wrote:
| A regular user who just downloads a build and runs it on
| their system (i.e. the most common use case, because it's
| the one that takes the least effort) also doesn't share
| anything. Why is it worse if a company does the exact
| same thing?
| layer8 wrote:
| Licenses are about legal agreements, not about ethics.
| Legality doesn't imply ethicality (nor vice versa). If this
| was about legality, people would say so.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Then why is there not a file outlining the ethical
| expectations, alongside the legal agreement? The
| companies using the products have no way of reading the
| developers' minds regarding expectations of reciprocity.
|
| The idea really isn't so far fetched, lots of projects
| today have non-legal outlines of expectations of
| community members. For a single example, codes of conduct
| are very common.
| layer8 wrote:
| I don't think this is a discussion about what the project
| owners specifically expect ethically (users would be free
| to disagree), but about what we collectively find to be
| ethical or unethical in this space. If there is
| disagreement about the ethicality, then one party having
| it written down doesn't change anything about the
| disagreement. And there is nothing that binds one party
| to submit to the other party's notion of ethicality,
| unless you turn it into a legal matter by making it part
| of the license.
|
| Again, this thread is about whether we as a society, or
| as the software development community at large, consider
| the behavior ethical or not. It is not about the specific
| open source developer imposing specific rules.
| rglullis wrote:
| > They can live as members of tribes, as evolution intended
| for us.
|
| Please, quit the cheap sophistry.
|
| Evolution doesn't intend or plan anything for us, and you
| will have a very hard time convincing people that we would be
| better off living in a tribal/clan society than whatever we
| have today.
| Vampiero wrote:
| Evolution intends in the sense that it follows an abstract
| fitness function. I didn't think I'd have to explain that
| here. I know how to implement evolution algorithmically.
|
| And no matter what you think about tribal societies, we
| still live in tribes every day. You and your close friends
| are a tribe. Your family is a tribe. Forums and now social
| media communities are tribes. HackerNews is a tribe. Open
| source projects are tribes, indeed they fork over
| ideological differences all the time. Political parties are
| tribes, indeed they split and antagonize each other all the
| time. Nationalities are tribes. Companies are tribes.
| Social classes are tribes. Subcultures and "identities" are
| tribes.
|
| We are not built to handle global contexts, so we collapse
| them into tribal ones. We do that for everything. There's
| always an in-group and an out-group and a hierarchy if
| we're talking about a cluster of people.
| rglullis wrote:
| A tribe assumes a strict hierarchy and mobility only
| though power and violence.
|
| I can agree with you about the issue of societies failing
| to organize themselves past a certain scale, but this is
| not a problem with "Capitalism".
| Vampiero wrote:
| Fair, I used a very loose definition then.
|
| My issue with capitalism is fundamentally split in three
| parts: that profit is the driving force behind action;
| that short term effects are prioritized over long term
| ones; and that global markets operate at a scale that
| does not allow individuals to have any real agency in
| their environment due to the points outlined in the
| previous comment.
|
| It just fosters the kind of behavior that goes against my
| idealized version of what society should be according to
| my understanding of the conditions in which we thrive.
|
| i.e. it turns people into selfish venal assholes and it
| destroys our chances at a better future with each passing
| day
|
| Perhaps I'm also using a wrong definition of anarchy
| then. But it's honestly the closest label I know for this
| concept. A less centralized society.
| capr wrote:
| But profit _is_ the driving force of human action. Doing
| anything voluntarily is by definition profitable,
| otherwise you wouldn't do it.
| KingMob wrote:
| This smears out the definition of profit beyond
| usefulness.
|
| I can pretty much guarantee hunter-gatherers hunt to not
| starve, children play for sheer joy, and nobody's
| thinking of profit.
|
| There are better psychological/anthropological terms to
| apply to human drives than calling them "profitable".
| That's weird economist thinking, trying to bring
| everything under their purview.
| spokaneplumb wrote:
| Worse, it's an attempt to get us to agree that humans
| only do things for profit, in order to advance an
| ideology and make our thought more malleable when an
| author turns around and starts writing about public
| policy and ethics applied to things that actually _are_
| about profit.
|
| At least that's what is going on when the schools of
| "thought" this kind of stuff comes from attempt it. This
| particular poster might not be. But usually it's a cheap
| rhetorical trick, coming from folks who present
| themselves as simply following logic. Gross.
| rglullis wrote:
| "My issue with capitalism is fundamentally split in three
| parts", then you go on to describe things that are not
| exclusive to Capitalism AT ALL.
|
| Again, please quit the cheap sophistry.
|
| > the kind of behavior that goes against my idealized
| version of what society should be
|
| Are you listening to yourself? You sound like a college
| sophomore who is sure has a solution to all of humanity's
| problems...
|
| > turns people into selfish venal assholes
|
| ... and can only assign blame on _others_.
|
| I can bet you nourish some well-developed fantasies about
| what you would do if you were given enough power over any
| "less centralized society", and they are a lot more about
| imposing your view over _everyone_ than _ensuring your
| small community can prosper and be happy_.
| sethev wrote:
| "then you go on to describe things that are not exclusive
| to Capitalism AT ALL."
|
| Why are they required to be exclusive? If I said that
| uncontrolled train crossings lead to more train crashes,
| would you retort that train crashes aren't exclusive to
| uncontrolled crossings?
| rglullis wrote:
| > Why are they required to be exclusive?
|
| They are not required to be exclusive, but it would
| require that we can establish cause and effect.
|
| If you tell me that your "issue with Capitalism" is that
| "we have people driven by profit/greed and wealth is
| unevenly distributed", but a quick look through history
| tells you we can always find "people driven by personal
| gain and wealth inequality", then what does "Capitalism"
| has to do with it?
| KingMob wrote:
| I'm sympathetic to some of what you're saying, and I believe
| the original hacker ethos spurred some of the original FS
| impulses, but...
|
| FOSS licenses don't, and _can 't_, embody anarchism (or any
| socialism) because they make no distinction between humans
| and capital-holding entities, lumping them all under the term
| "users".
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Which megacorporation abused Gitea here? And how?
| nirui wrote:
| Many open source developers has misread the room and thinking
| the environment is still like it was 15~20 years ago where open
| source software were the works of hobbyists who has a well-paid
| day job and only here for street credit.
|
| You know who read the room correctly? GitLab. They've found a
| balanced way to offer their product under an open source scheme
| while keeping their lights on. They've earned trust as well as
| income, that's a job well done.
|
| If one wants to live off of their open source work, then they
| need to run it as a business and perform appropriate business
| tricks. Otherwise their own effort may one day become their own
| rip-off. Not saying anything sinister, but fairness is a
| balancing game, if you hard work don't treat you well, then
| it's unfair too.
| plagiarist wrote:
| GitLab has collected a few severe CVEs. I would choose "v4
| final final actually final" folders as a versioning scheme
| before I used them. It is surprising to me that they have any
| users at all.
| fluoridation wrote:
| What does that have to do with whether it's a successful
| business?
| lolinder wrote:
| FOSS isn't a business model. It never was and never will be.
|
| What Free Software always was is an ethical movement--one which
| didn't need to prioritize income streams because the point
| wasn't sustainable development, it was user freedom. Nowhere in
| "users should have the freedom to do what they want with
| software" does it say "and we should be able to pay a few
| developers a salary for their work towards that fundamentally
| ethical goal". Under the original paradigm and goals, any
| income streams are just cream on top of doing the right thing.
|
| According to the OSI's history of itself [0], at some point
| people got it into their heads that the open development model
| was inherently a good one for business, too--Netscape jumped on
| board, and then some people got together and decided to rebrand
| Free Software:
|
| > The conferees decided it was time to dump the moralizing and
| confrontational attitude that had been associated with "free
| software" in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same
| pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape.
| They brainstormed about tactics and a new label. "Open source",
| contributed by Chris Peterson, was the best thing they came up
| with.
|
| The word FOSS reminds me a lot of American corporate Buddhism--
| mindfulness and meditation totally removed from its original
| deeply religious context and turned into some sort of self-help
| program, with the result being something that would be barely
| recognizable to the original practitioners. Free Software was
| never about sustainable development. It was about doing the
| right thing--enabling user freedom--because it is right.
| Everything else was just means to that end, but at some point
| along the line the means became the end and we started
| wondering why FOSS wasn't paying the bills like it was supposed
| to.
|
| [0]
| http://web.archive.org/web/20071115150105/https://opensource...
| notdiaphone wrote:
| > FOSS isn't a business model. It never was and never will
| be.
|
| This seems an interesting point and one I share. Yet it seems
| equally unethical to enable the corporate extractavism that
| we now see. It's time the "users should have the freedom to
| do what they want with software" be updated to something like
| 'users and makers should be free of coercion and exploitation
| by software.' What, after all, are the grounds for such
| freedoms? Are they issues of property? Or are they ones of
| the dignity of the persons involved? It doesn't seem
| controversial that we tend to find it problematic if another
| uses us as means to their ends without our consent. In
| personal actions, many act as if they believe this. Yet
| corporations consistently do not act with those values.
| You're right: we should strive toward a system not in which
| it's viable to create businesses out of FOSS but in which
| both users and developers are not exploited or used
| unwillingly.
| fluoridation wrote:
| >Yet it seems equally unethical to enable the corporate
| extractavism that we now see.
|
| If someone uses and benefits from your product, at what
| point does it become "unethical extractivism"? If I as an
| individual figure out a way to build a business centered
| around your product that you make for free, is that already
| unethical, or is it at a later point?
|
| >It doesn't seem controversial that we tend to find it
| problematic if another uses us as means to their ends
| without our consent.
|
| But you gave your consent by publishing software for anyone
| to use.
| KingMob wrote:
| > What Free Software always was is an ethical movement--one
| which didn't need to prioritize income streams because the
| point wasn't sustainable development, it was user freedom.
|
| This actually illustrates the key flaw in Stallman's
| understanding. To him, "user" encompassed both humans and
| megacorporations. But a corporation is an abstract legal
| convenience, cannot feel the pain of being "thwarted" in its
| use of software, and thus, want freedom. Freedom is only an
| ethical good for humans.
|
| Further, I would argue that providing megacorporations with
| unpaid labor is deeply misguided, if not actually unethical
| itself. Encouraging otherwise borders on encouraging
| exploitation.
|
| tl;dr Nobody should go broke to enrich Bezos in their spare
| time, and encouraging THAT is unethical.
| asddubs wrote:
| Well, stallman would probably advocate for the AGPL in such
| cases, which the megacorps are still wary of.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Stallman's reasoning wasn't flawed (at least, not in the
| respect you state). Corporations are simply a group of
| humans. I don't think there's a good argument to be made
| that humans should have a right to X, but suddenly lose
| that right when they get together as a group.
|
| > Further, I would argue that providing megacorporations
| with unpaid labor is deeply misguided, if not actually
| unethical itself.
|
| Nobody is "providing megacorporations with unpaid labor".
| People are making an effort to put something out there for
| the benefit of the entire human race, and if that includes
| corporations that's fine. Not one person is harmed if
| Amazon takes my open source project and uses it to turn a
| profit, even if they make it into closed source. My project
| remains freely available for the benefit of all, just as it
| was before Amazon used it. So who exactly has been harmed?
| Not me, I'm in the same state as I was before. Not my (non-
| Amazon) users, they are in the same state as they were
| before. Not Amazon, of course. If every single person is no
| worse off or even better off than before, I don't see how
| you can argue that the corporate users are doing something
| unethical. It seems to me that really this isn't about
| ethics, but is about "we don't like those icky people"
| masquerading in pretty sounding language.
|
| > tl;dr Nobody should go broke to enrich Bezos in their
| spare time...
|
| Nobody should go broke to make open source software,
| period.
| lolinder wrote:
| Fully agreed. This attitude--that someone making money
| off my freely published work is somehow hurting me--was,
| I think, best captured by the inimitable Matt Mullenweg
| in his response to DHH [0]:
|
| > DHH claims to be an expert on open source, but his
| toxic personality and inability to scale teams means that
| although he has invented about half a trillion dollars
| worth of good ideas, most of the value has been captured
| by others.
|
| There's a certain type of open source maintainer that is
| in it for the money--in it to "capture value"--and those
| people see it as a personal affront if someone else
| "captures" more "value" from their project than they do.
| This is not a healthy way to approach life, and it's not
| an effective way to approach free software. It's
| _especially_ not an effective way to approach Open
| Source, which rolls back the GPL 's copyleft provisions
| and makes it very explicit that you're doing this work
| for the collective benefit of everyone, _including_
| people who want to make proprietary stuff on top.
|
| [0] http://web.archive.org/web/20241014235025/https://ma.
| tt/2024...
| rapnie wrote:
| > So who exactly has been harmed?
|
| Society, because your free work gives big tech the
| continuous headstart to focus on bottom line and forget
| about externalities. Look at current society and how much
| everyone is cranking their tech out fast as possible,
| including free software folks who start coding on the
| first hint of an idea. Starting hobby, then comes
| popularity and subsequently big tech adoption (read:
| harvesting of low-hanging fruit) so they can do more of
| their thing: ruthless value extraction.. from society. We
| are not talking healthy circular money flows, big tech is
| billionaire class leaning stuff, imho.
| spookie wrote:
| Sometimes I wish I could upvote twice in replies like this.
| alberth wrote:
| FOSS is a _distribution_ strategy, not a business model.
| jcarrano wrote:
| Copyleft licenses are supposed to prevent to an extent this
| sort of free riding, but they are no longer "fashionable".
|
| I don't see the point of refusing to add additional (copyleft)
| terms to a license, only to end up hoping companies act as if
| the terms existed out of good will.
|
| Companies like Google love the permissive licenses, and go as
| far as to sponsor MIT/BSD-licensed replacements to common
| building blocks like toybox.
|
| EDIT: I see that Forgejo v9+ is indeed GPL-licensed.
| KingMob wrote:
| I agree that copyleft is less fashionable these days, but I
| think big companies have figured out all the tricks they
| need.
|
| Case in point: Amazon offers a hosted Grafana service, which
| is AGPL. They may not be able to meaningfully change the code
| in secret, but they can still impoverish the actual Grafana
| creators trying to sell Grafana as a service.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I released a tiny toy fun project under the GPL. It's the
| kind of thing that no one could possible want to monetize,
| but the first PR was someone pleading the case that I should
| relicense to something more friendly, like MIT. I'd never
| before been so instantly tempted to ban someone from a
| project.
| notdiaphone wrote:
| This paints it as if Gitea was not a fork of Gogs specifically
| to turn a profit out of something they did not make on their
| own. I might be more sympathetic if they'd created Gitea, but
| given it's a fork of another project, it looks a lot like
| they're playing the same game that beat them.
| layer8 wrote:
| I don't think this is quite correct. Gitea was a community
| fork of Gogs, because Gogs was limited by its single
| maintainer, who was often unresponsive for months. See
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13296717
| mardifoufs wrote:
| How exactly does that apply? What's the "corporate welfare"
| here? Almost nobody is profiting off Gitea, especially not big
| tech. I know using the big tech boogeyman is useful to justify
| open source projects rugpulling on their licenses, but it
| doesn't even apply here. Not that it usually makes sense[0],
| but in this case it's not even something that the maintainers
| themselves ever alluded to.
|
| [0] projects like MongoDB, ElasticSearch or Redis only became
| popular because they were OSS, and probably limited competition
| for years simply because competing with free is hard. only to
| then switch on their users years further down the line. So any
| money that they ever got was due to them being OSS in the first
| place since absolutely nobody would've used MongoDB 1.0 if it
| was a commercial product.
| tuananh wrote:
| we are considering moving from gitlab to forgejo. it's not a
| immediate concern but i think the days of gitlab are numbered
| with recent change in top management.
| prakashn27 wrote:
| Ex-meta engineer here. I miss their internal GitHub which is a
| mercurial fork. They have so many awesome features like layered
| PRs.
|
| That is something I have not seen anywhere .
| dartos wrote:
| Been using forgejo for years to maintain mirrors of GitHub repos
| I like.
|
| Works great. Easy to set up (especially on nixos)
| jamsio wrote:
| The fact that Open Source is about sharing, and they don't share.
| They only take.
| meonkeys wrote:
| Please explain. Not clicking those links.
| antoineMoPa wrote:
| It's not clear from the landing page whether it's a git code
| platform / mercurial / entirely new VCS. I wish it was clearer
| (looking at the Readme, looks like it's indeed a git hosting
| platform).
|
| I don't really care about the governance model as a user seeing
| this landing page for the first time, so I wonder why it's so
| prominent, vs telling me what the actual product is.
| vollbrecht wrote:
| I think this is a great peace of software, though i think its
| mostly tailored for the single dev, or business case for closed
| source software, but much less a software peace that allow for
| great community building. I think this is because of:
|
| a) The network effect that you inherently get with for example
| github b) The barrier to create accounts on yet another platform
| to contribute.
|
| In that regards i find the original way of just using email's to
| send patches just such a brilliant idea, because at least it
| eliminates my second point completely. That's why i think
| sourcehut [0] is such a nice idea at least in theory. Though now
| you have to teach people not only how to use "git" but also how
| to use "git" via email :D
|
| https://sourcehut.org/
| mroche wrote:
| Gitea and Forgejo support OAuth integration and AGit Flow*,
| which is a breath of fresh air compared to the connected "fork"
| and PR strategies. It's a good middle ground between the
| "modern" method and email collaboration. With some UX tweaks it
| could become very accessible for many.
|
| Available platforms like Codeberg provide the option to sign
| in/register with GitHub and GitLab auth, so needing "yet
| another account" has become a much weaker argument.
|
| * https://forgejo.org/docs/latest/user/agit-support/
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| Is it a "software forge" or is it just using git locally?
| remram wrote:
| It is similar to GitHub, it's a fork of Gitea whose site has
| screenshots: https://about.gitea.com/
|
| (couldn't find any on Forgejo's site)
| qudat wrote:
| I'm working on a git collaboration server that doesn't require a
| git remote.
|
| The premise is to leverage format-patch with an ssh app and then
| rely on range-diff:
|
| https://pr.pico.sh
|
| I'm curious what others here think
| sitkack wrote:
| I think it is an interesting take. It might be nice to point
| folks towards https://github.com/picosh/git-pr it has a better
| explanation.
|
| So this is like the email source diff/patching workflow but
| extended to use ssh instead?
|
| I try and limit my ssh access to servers and endpoints that I
| control. The attack surface for ssh is actually quite large.
|
| It seems since you are shipping a patch, that it could be
| _signed_ with your ssh key, but posted over https. This would
| make running a server way way more portable. Everything else
| about it seems quite nice.
|
| Since the language is Go, creating an https service should be
| just as easy correct?
|
| I like the idea of dynamic RSS streams with patches flying
| around.
|
| https://www.phind.com/search?cache=izzjsrslnqwrwmh3mtxwyrx4
| qudat wrote:
| Exactly. People don't struggle with format-patch, they
| struggle with integrating patches into their email clients.
|
| Our design philosophy is to not require the project's git
| repo in order to enable developers to collaborate.
|
| We are also trying to make this service a supplement to other
| code forges. Competing with GitHub is a huge uphill battle,
| instead I'm thinking of this service more as a patch-bin
| instead of a git collaboration tool for corporate entities
| sitkack wrote:
| I like the concept of patch-bin, great description.
| hackerbrother wrote:
| I think Gitea not being maintained via Gitea was reason enough to
| fork it-- I am glad Forgejo did!
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