Go Away Microsoft! The Netherlands is Quietly Building Its Own GitHub Replacement
3 months ago by Lee Duna to c/technology
A) It's forgejo, so any forgejo instance (including Codeberg) can access it (since it's federated.
B) Coordinating something like this eu-wide is much more difficult than in just the netherlands.
I would like to see some form of federated CI/CD chain, like sending code to an institution for testing and getting a certificate back - maybe as a public service, maybe as a private service.
But that is a long ways off.
Just like the Fediverse, it's actually better and healthier if more people/groups/nations host their own (whether public or private). More diversity, less centralization.
The lack of clean and transparent federation between them is certainly inconvenient but is not a permanent roadblock, it is simply a known and well-understood technical problem that work is ongoing to solve. git itself already has very mature support for complete decentralization and decentralized workflows, it's all of Github's feature layers like user accounts, PR management, issue tracking, CI/CD and the various other workflow and project management layers that may need to be connected and federated across the different Forgejo-based platforms (and hopefully other platforms too in the future). Users and permissions and PRs and issue reporting are among the most critical parts, and I think they are looking at Fediverse's ActivityPub as a method for enabling much of that.
The more large organizations that choose to build their own viable, permanent and financially stable Forgejo platforms, the more attractive and necessary proper federation between them becomes, and the more assured it will become the first-class feature it needs to be.
We are not building a mere Github replacement that drops into its centralized place, wears its shoes and follows its same path to inevitable corporate capture and enshittification. We are building a decentralized standard to be the democratic foundation for future software development and collaboration that no one can, should, or will be able to exclusively control. It's not done yet, but this the right way for it to start so that something like SourceForge (for those old enough to remember that trainwreck) or Github never becomes a problem again.
Are you building up such a project ?
Slowly, when time permits, but yes. If you want to help, there is plenty of work that needs to be done
I'm not a technical person:)))
Another problem is language or languages, EU has what? 15 different languages and none of them will agree which language should be primary because not everyone speaks English, for me it wouldn't be a problem i'm from the Balkans, i work and live in Germany and use German at home and at work and mainly use English on my phone, PC and while watching movies, shows, etc. so for me there is a choice of 3 different languages while my wife can speak only German so how would we all agree what language should be the primary for this project?
What do you mean, primarily? You don't need a primary language. You can have it translated in every official language in the EU. It can be translated at scale very easily. As an EU wide project it is absolutely no trouble at all.
And here’s the thing most people miss:
robots are writing this junk
why not just use codeberg?
They do use the same software. I think it is a good idea they run a separate instance, so the hosting costs are automatically covered by the government for the code they develop. This also avoids the centralization on a single provider.
Digital sovereignty. Codeberg is funding development of forgejo. Forgejo will federate to other instances. So you can have your own repo and someone on another forgejo can interact remotely. So no need for centralized platforms anymore. Power of the Fediverse! :-)
Instead of a company owning the monopoly on the data and the infrastructure, the ActivityPub protocol allows for federated instances to communicate with one another so while you might sign in and join through one site, you might find something interesting coming from one of the interested. Same protocol that Lemmy, Mastadon, BlueSky, PeerTube, and some other platforms run that allows for Programming.dev to communicate with Lemmy.ML of Feddit.it
This is going to federate via ActivityPub. My understanding if you'll have a centralized repo under someone or some business. But you could have your own account and fork their repo to your federated server. You can work there, push changes and it goes up.
Being AP you can follow changes, get alerts on releases, etc.
"What about forge federation?
Federation is under active development, and is considered experimental. This is because many required features−notably moderation and access control−have not yet been developed.
The Forgejo project reserves the right to make breaking changes to its federation components with no prior warning. Such changes may be “backwards incompatible” and could result in the (sub-)domain used for your Forgejo instance to be “burned”. This means that the domain will no longer be usable for ActivityPub-based federation in the future, no matter whether you set up Forgejo from scratch or choose to use other software that uses ActivityPub.
For more information on implemented features and future federation-related plans, check out the federation roadmap.
If you are interested in working on federation-related code, consider joining our federation-focused Matrix room: #forgejo-federation:matrix.org (web link)"
https://forgejo.org/ https://forgejo.org/... https://codeberg.org/...
Is this an ongoing project ?
Yup!
Yes, that’s true for the git repo itself, but a git forge can provide a multitude of related services, including issues and pull request management, CI/CD pipelines, wikis, static content hosting, package registries, etc. which are not as easily migrated.
I honestly think wiki, static hosting, package registries etc. don't belong on a git repo. Github has continuously extended their feature-set, but its caused vendor lock-in which I think is the point. How hard is it to spin up a web service to host static content? There are loads of good open source wiki projects, etc.
Why do it yourself in a complicated way and poke holes in my firewall and security if I can use the existing infrastructure that is already a publiclly accessible web page to host just another one? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Depends on the point of the wiki I feel, if it's project documentation it should be in git alongside the code, if it's a generic "document store" then yeah there's better storage backends than git.
Something's are more inherent to git forges imho Like forking, merge requests, secret branches, and team permissions.
I would prefer those be behind an API and fed into a more flexible UI honestly with the other panels being user defined views to other tools. Like a UI for tekton. A UI for Caddy or hugo or something. A UI for your issues tracker. Etc.
Even better if it federates those backends...
Maybe let the site admin have a list of approved views and configs so people aren't putting compromised views on the site.
They're saying he was already famous and then did another thing that would make a person famous.
Git forges provides a lot of features these days now. From Merge requests, forks, issues tracking, secret branches, to team management stuff.
A lot more stuff gets bolted onto but they are arguably more optional but for some are the point lol
Like ci/cd at the forge level is the best to me for dev centric flows
Are you a git expert ?
Oops, I read the headline like the neanderthals are building their own github and got really curious!
Krijg eens even gauw de graftyfus
What does that mean ??
Don't we have GitLab and Codeberg already? I mean I'm here for variety and choice but this isn't grounbreaking
uhm, this is about a Forgejo instance. Which Codeberg also uses...
Hi, I'm the brave soul reading it for you.
Currently, the Dutch government's code is spread across GitHub and GitLab, neither of which is under government oversight.
GitHub got ruled out first because it's proprietary software, which directly conflicts with the government's own policy of preferring open source when options are equally suitable.
GitLab made it further in the evaluation but didn't survive it either. The issue was its open-core model, where the Community Edition is genuinely free software but the Enterprise Edition is not.
Forgejo came out on top due to its fully free and open source nature. Licensed under GPLv3+ and governed by Codeberg e.V., a democratic nonprofit, it has no enterprise tier, proprietary upsell, or vendor lock-in problems.
Oh okay. The title insinuated that they were building their own replacement so I was confused. This seems much more reasonable
Will it have blackjack and hookers?
blackjack, hookers, weed, and shrooms
has a nice cadence for chanting repeatedly, possibly while standing in a circle around some tulips and holding hands
No, you want to be holding hands on a circle around a human skull with goat horns drilled into the forehead, the whole thing in a five -pointed star and covered with fresh bunny guts.
Some alternatives.. codeberg.org sr.ht
Hup Holland Hup!
Wait scratch that…
Hub Holland Hub!
From TFA:
GitLab made it further in the evaluation but didn't survive it either. The issue was its open-core model, where the Community Edition is genuinely free software but the Enterprise Edition is not.
I use it at home and I was shocked when I knew it even runs VBA.
Unfortunately my work laptop has to be windows. I won’t touch Microslop product after working hours.
Edit: since they used forgejo, I meant by next is replacing Microslop Office with open source.
Unfortunately my work laptop has to be windows. I won’t touch Microslop product after working hours.
You mean that it has to be Microsoft? Cuz Libreoffice works on windows.
Truth
Nice! I just don't like that only Git is supported. Mercurial also needs love.
You are using piefed, so in the web ui you can click the three dot menu and select the remind me option. This isn't in the api though, so it wouldn't be in a third-party app unless they implemented it separately.
@remindme@mstdn.social 24 hours
I wouldn't personally go as far as saying you should use it. Using it, and it deserving love (and support) are all related but fundamentally different questions. I agree that Mercurial deserves love, I'm not sure if it actually deserves support (but because it deserves love, I am willing to entertain the possibility, and support the idea of supporting it). I don't think anyone should use it as a primary tool, but it might be worth using out of love, and if people still love it, maybe that's worth some support. I don't know, I'm not anybody's boss, I'm not telling anybody what to do, I'm just making suggestions.
Mercurial is frankly a lot nicer and more comfortable to actually work with, it has much better UX overall that fits into a much cleaner mental model with fewer exposed sharp edges you can cut yourself on, and can work pretty much transparently with git and can even use git as a backend in almost all cases. The downside is that like VHS vs. Beta, it is such a distant second place in popularity and adoption that it really has no realistic path forward, no matter how much better designed one could argue it is. Like @Holla@feddit.org suggested, the only thing better than being the actual best option, is being standardized, and git is basically completely and universally standardized at this point. And there are genuine benefits to that standardization, and there are genuine benefits to git itself too.
If you want to paper over git with some nice UX, Mercurial might be worth a shot, you might not like it at all... or you might love it, and it does deserve some love. But realistically, in a world where git is the standard, that isn't going to reduce your cognitive load, it's only going to add another layer of cognitive load. You have to love it to want that. And maybe you would love it. But git is not going away, even for those of us who love Mercurial, I think we have mostly all come to terms with the fact that git won the DVCS wars and that's just the reality we live in now. Even having accepted that, I can still cheerfully sing Mercurial's praises and wear my rose colored glasses when I look at it, despite not even using it anymore myself.
I gave up and converted all my personal hg repos to git and gitea (now forgejo) a couple years ago. It's fine. I'm fluent in git now, I have to be for work, I can do powerful (sometimes dangerous and exciting) things with git and I wouldn't give that up. I realistically probably speak git better than I speak hg nowadays, but like anyone who learned English as a second language and now uses it primarily, it is always a delight and a comfort to have any opportunity to return to the old mother tongue, no matter how briefly or simplistically, and hg still represents that delightful experience for me. Even when I start to forget native words and have to mix git phrases in that I can't think of an hg equivalent for.
Having alternatives is always good! And BTW, Git won not because it was better than mercurial...
Sure, at the very beginning of the launch of Git, Mercurial was better/had more features/more mature/etc.
That's just not true after 20 years of mainstream git adoption and development today.
Mercurial is also simpler than Git and the commands are more intuitive
Using hg-git everywhere reinforces the idea that Mecurial is a second-class citizen. (Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful that an option for interoperability exists, but I wish it weren't needed.)
If there is any such thing as perfect software, I would say Git is probably it.
Mercurial seems cool but I don't think there's a real reason to move away from Git unless they come up with some groundbreaking new feature that no one has even imagined yet.
When (if) they manage to add federation to it, then both sites could even work together.
More hosts better than one. I doubt codeberg will be able to sustain the load remaining as free as it is now when it will be popular enough that every cs student will be using it for their assignments (forgetting to gitignore their IDE cache files obviously). Or some smartasses start abusing it for free storage. I mean everything that github has to deal with currently.
IIRC their tos says it must only be used for opensource software (i don't remember if it was enforced yet but expect that they can remove private repos at any time or make them paid feature). Same story with sourcehut
I don't at all see how this is relevant though? They are using another 'standard' already, Forgejo. And they are just hosting it themselves, so that they are in full control. If anything I'm actually astonished they didn't already do something like this.
In the age of techno-feudalism, one becomes used to standards being tied to a specific organization.
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It should be a European project not only for NL
save