Open Source Development now on Codeberg Link to heading
Effectively immediately, I have migrated all of my Open Source projects from GitHub to Codeberg.
Future Open Source development will continue on Codeberg only.
All GitHub repositories will remain available as public archives to ensure that nothing breaks for other people and the scholarly record is maintained. However, please look to my Zenodo code archive if you are looking for stable and citeable code releases.
Why Codeberg? Link to heading
I’ve become increasingly concerned about the future of open source projects hosted by commercial companies, more specifically companies based in the United States. The wholesale turn towards AI in the enterprise world and its pillage of the open software and open culture ecosystem has been quite bad already. However, add to that the erratic, immoral and brutal behavior of the second Trump administration, which is likely to grow worse over time. It is quite probable that every bit of US soft power will be turned into a political weapon before long, including the market dominance of its tech companies.
What could this mean in practice? A shutdown of “leftist” open source projects? Account bans for human rights lawyers? Sharing of personal data on “undesirables” with law enforcement? Intentional censorship of source code? I have no idea, but the tariff saga, enforced disappearance of persons in the US and the constant attacks on the rule of law should make anyone wary of relying on US infrastructure.
Therefore I’ve chosen to migrate all of my Open Source projects to Codeberg, a git hosting platform run by the eponymous German non-profit organization. Codeberg is organized as a collective membership-based non-profit and I’ve additionally chosen to join the non-profit as a member because I believe it is important to keep the stewardship of open source infastructure in the community instead of outsourcing it to commercial companies.
Technically speaking, Codeberg has impressed me.
- The Codeberg web interface is much (!) faster and more responsive compared to GitHub
- The Git clone and push feel about twice as fast as GitHub (not that it matters much)
- Much cleaner interface than GitHub, esp. less bloat and less featuritis
- No silly AI tools being pushed into my face all the time
- Codeberg activity overview is very helpful and well organized
- Codeberg migration tool works well
- The OSS git platform software that Codeberg runs is called Forgejo, a fork of Gitea.
I look forward to exploring Codeberg and engaging with the non-profit organization in the future!
Notes on the Migration Link to heading
The migration from GitHub to Codeberg was largely painless, although moving, checking and archiving ~30 repositories individually took some time.
Codeberg offers an excellent migration tool that can copy repositories from GitHub and other Git hosting platforms, including wikis, LFS files, issues, pull requests, labels, milestones and releases. I primarily migrated issues and releases, but everything looks like it is in order.
Codeberg does offer private repositories, but limits them to 100 MB in size because the organization wants to promote open source, not private development. I believe this is fair.