Since Microsoft owns Github, Gitlab is Corp owned now since 2022, why are so many who preach privacy or using Linux, etc, still using a MS product?
Genuine questions. I’m assumming either familiarity & simplicity with GH or difficulty migrating elsewhere?
I’d say familiarity is it.
It sure isnt the uptime!
Inertia is a hell of a fundamental property of the universe.
I am moving to codeberg / forgejo… slowly… I’m gonna migrate everything one day I swear.
it’s also because they don’t believe the same confused fundamentalist nonsense OP does
For Codeberg, they don’t allow commercial projects. You of course have Forgejo (which is what Codeberg utilises), and many open-source developers have been moving to it. I’ve also heard some projects switching over to GitLab as well, which is corporate-owned, but I believe has a self-hosted option that gives people a little more control. But for many people, GitHub works fine as it is and don’t want the hassle of transferring their projects, commit history, issues, etc. over.
why are so many who preach privacy or using Linux, etc, still using a MS product?
As someone else already mentioned, familarity. You published a repo of your foss project so other people can contribute to it and the more the merrier. Most people happen to be on github.
I think Microsoft learned their lesson finally on fucking up acquisitions (talking Mixer especially lol) where they buy out a platform but then curse it with their touch and it fails. Now, with LinkedIn and Github, they sort of leave it be with subtle and incremental changes because then petiole continue to adopt it. Now its like FB or Snapchat where people are there bc they think everyone else is there (assuming). Idk, it sucks.
That’s why a federated git repo network of could be pretty cool.
My customer decided to host their shit there ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If you’re talking about companies, safety, SLA/SLO agreements, security, lack of admin overhead…lots of reasons.
Lots of companies and projects are leaving GitHub because of the Copilot being shoved down everyone’s throats though.
One thing that keeps me from using codeberg more is that private repos are limited to 100MB. So I still need to use GitHub to keep some of my personal projects that contain purchased assets that can’t be made public. I do still have a codeberg account and mirror what I can, but it means I can’t stop using GitHub for now.
For private repos you could always host your own Forgejo. That way they’re actually private, too, not that Codeberg is untrustworthy, but not needing to trust anyone is even better.
I mean I’m not really concerned about it being actually private, I just need to not have asset creators become pissed at me for publicly hosting their paid assets. Self hosting forgejo is on my to-do list but until then I’m using GitHub as a free project host for my unity/blender projects with paid assets. A single one of those projects easily blows past the codeberg 100MB private repo limit.
Besides that, basically the only use I have for GitHub is to contribute to repos on GitHub or to open / comment on issues. So it feels kind of useless to use codeberg since it defeats the whole purpose when the repos I want to interact with aren’t there.
Self hosting also means I wouldn’t be able to accept PRs, comments, or issues from other people unless I let them create accounts, which is something I don’t want to moderate. I was waiting for forgejo to get federation to self host it but I haven’t seen an update from them about that in a while.
So basically there are 2 things I use GitHub for:
- Keeping private projects safe, which are too big for codeberg to allow
- Opening issues on repos that are on GitHub, so using codeberg completely defeats the purpose
Codeberg is like a GitHub where the projects I want to interact with don’t exist, and copying the projects there doesn’t help me give feedback to the original authors.
Stupidity and momentum.
I and I imagine barely anyone ever heard of Codeberg until the past year like me when I made an account and the website was loading at a snails pace. Github, Gitlab, and Bitbucket are way more established.
Every employer I’ve worked for either uses Github, Gitlab, or Bitbucket in that order of commonality. Then any that self hosts uses Gitlab either free or Ultimate. I imagine anyone writing pipelines would like to stick with what they’re comfortable with. I imagine migrating gitlab ci to foregejo actions can be annoying especially on huge projects unless you’re already using something like Tekton to build out your own CI pipelines. How I see my project managers use Gitlab Ultimate features to link together issues, milestones, commits, merge requests, branches, epics, create filters for the issues boards, etc - I’m impressed.
A lot of co-mingling between different groups within the organization to create some levels of siloed operations. There’s stuff like sharing user databases between Gitlab and other products that aren’t gitlab. API stuff where you make a gitlab account and it propogates to other services and that even includes stuff like group management in gitlab and other services non-gitlab. A bunch of stuff that I barely have to work to achieve like getting sonarqube or other services to easily integrate into Gitlab pipelines and create conditional actions in them and the merge requests comments to notify developers of findings. I have no doubt used very little that’s out there that offers easy integration into Gitlab and Github workflows.
Our pipeline inserts milestone links into our changelogs. We use the Gitlab project wikis and release pages. We use the gitlab package and container registries. Self hosting runners is super easy. There are a lot of 3rd party services that host github and gitlab runners that are really click and they’re ready to go. I don’t have enough experience with Codeberg yet but Gitlabs CI file text editor and the browser embedded VS Code I find very useful.
On Gitlab, these are very useful. I’d want something similar on codeberg rather than dealing with all that myself along with other key/token management
https://docs.gitlab.com/ci/variables/predefined_variables/
For the most part, I would expect people to go where they’re most familiar and at work they’ll be most familiar with Github and Gitlab and if you want your code to be seen, you’ll go where the bulk of developers are
Thank you for the detailed explanation. As a non Dev, I more or less assumed it was more pet projects and foss apps than business repos or projects.
I also felt like if projects are linked on a company or business website to bitbucket or codeberg, etc, it wouldn’t matter because it’s getting exposure that way. And also assuming a git repo basically functions the same way regardless of where it’s hosted with some minor differences in tools.
I suck at programming, and GH is easier to use. As I learn more, and gain some skill, I’ll waste Codeberg’s server space instead of Microsoft’s
how ungodly massive are your repos that you’d be “wasting” a noticable amount of space?
Regarding Codeberg:
- Codeberg only services free and open source projects
- There are other limitatiosns:
- They don’t provide a free, well designed and isolated CI like GitHub does
- The space of Packages/Registry is limited
- As it’s quite niche there are a lot less people on that platform in general
- Although GitHub is under fire for their uptime: The uptime of Codeberg is quite comparable to GitHub, when having a look at the functionality that both platforms have in common.
Regarding self-hosting:
- Too expensive / time intensive for most devs that just want to code
are you using all those qualifiers for the CI together, or separately? Because they absolutely have free CI
Well it’s “free” but it quite a lot of caveats, restrictions and requires signing up.
you seem to have missed that forgejo actions exists, and codeberg provides free runners with no particular restrictions, just asking that you be mindful of your usage.
PoV: I’m a dev and I want to put my code out there. GH is basically a social network that aims to show my project to like-minded folk, no other service does that. Personally I enjoy this social aspect and occasionally check on GH feed to see what the circle around me is doing, to catch sw trends.
Why would I be concerned about privacy when the idea is to make it public? GH is just a free host that happens to be most popular and it would reach most eyes, the best chance of getting back some contributions.
If I used any other git hosting service - my code would be scrapped just the same, but would reach almost no human. If I tried to publicise the project myself, the other devs and potential new users will be far more likely to click on a GH link than any alternative. Self hosted solution would get least clicks. People like familiar URLs that lead them to “safe” sites.
Among big tech, I actually prefer Microsoft over Google, Meta and others. Yes, MS is just as disgusting, but at least they are grossly incompetent and only manage to execute a fraction of evil schemes they come up with. It’s funny to watch actually.
It’s not just familiarity, it’s lack of awareness of the history of how we got to here.
Part of what made OSS into what it is was the last 30 years of advocacy. A lot of those advocates are now middle-aged and thinking more about retirement than about the next wave of OSS that needs to supplant the Big Tech that OSS built.
Back in 2001, OSS development centered around mailing lists. https://marc.info/ is a graveyard of OSS mailing lists that largely died off somewhere between 2010-2015. Just as most of the earlier wave of OSS folks were having kids and settling into their middle-tier jobs with the Big Tech firms they helped build.
Gen A / Gen Z needs to step into the advocacy shoes that the Gen X / Millenial OSS advocates filled 20-some years ago. Figure out where next-gen OSS will be built and get to it.
When going so far back: Please do not leave out the FL part of FLOSS. Free/Libre software kicked this all off, the OSS is a later attempt to “sell” the development process FL software came up with to companies, stripping out all the pesky ideas about society benefiting for moving all the benefits over to the companies using OSS. Free/libre softwsre and OSS are technically the same, but the idea behind the licenses are so very different: Free/libre software wsnt to give rights to end users, OSS cares about the freedom of the developers between yourself and end users – giving the companies the right to commercialize your work for you.
The moment you stop caring for the social and societal aspects of software, it becomes OK to host on a proprietary service. That was never the case for the free/libre parts of our community. Those projects tend to shun proprietary services like discord, github and stuff. Pretty old fashined… not very sexy for young devs:-(
Agreed. That’s my point exactly - some folks pulled the ladder up behind themselves, others just kept their head down and stuck to their own project. Far too few maintained the advocacy loudly enough to maintain the momentum or to keep their corporate overlords honest. And now, projects are dying from lack of maintainership. nginx-ingress is a good example.
the xz supply-chain attack highlights another issue confronting modern FLOSS efforts. what’s a community to do when their software is the target of nation-state actors interested in playing geopolitical games with their software? and now they need to grapple with AI-generated bug reports, AI-generated contributions?
It’s an interesting time. I wish I had better ideas about what possible solutions might be.
To be fair: Free software projects were and also are dying from lack of ownership.
And the existing free software projects tend to be old and make it really hard for young people to join IMHO. They avoid the popular (and proprietary) stuff, which makes them hard to discover and their processes seem archaic.
Hell yeah! Great perspective.
Very nice! This makes total sense. Let me rebuttal with Enshittification
“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”
Microsoft is good at fucking up platforms they acquire! Lately they’ve just been more patient with it.
It is almost trivial to move git code from one hoster to another. If GitHub becomes so bad, you just move.
It’s trivial if your project is trivial. Once you’ve got development/CI/CD workflows, releases, issue management, community interaction, maybe even project management or Github pages (may god have mercy on your soul), it gets a lot less trivial.
Git itself is a distributed version control system, moving it around is indeed trivial. It’s everything else that Github provides that is far less trivial, and they’ve worked hard on building the vendor lock-in elements for those things lately.
True, but there are also exporter scripts for that stuff. Many projects have also mirroring already set up.
