[debugnik]

I swear HN has some sort of Mandela effect about Codeberg's mission. Their website clearly states they're a community-led non-profit that hosts like-minded FOSS projects, and their FAQ directly asks you to host private repos somewhere else.

Yet the amount of comments in this site proposing them as a GitHub alternative for individuals and companies, and suggesting them to move their repos there is absurd, and not enough people correct them.

[lifthrasiir]

Do yourself a favor and look at the actual HN thread [1] when Codeberg was widely discussed for the first time. It is crystal clear that Codeberg was seen as a direct alternative to GitHub at that time, and even the founder's quoted statement gave a nod to that I think?

> [...] But as developers of free software we fell into a trap – we poured invaluable source code, documentation and last not least a huge and steady stream of data about our personalities, interests and social networks into proprietary platforms. [...]

(And no one knew Codeberg had a right to determine which source code and documentation is invaluable.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22795930

[debugnik]

I just did, in fact I vaguely remembered it from back then, and after reading the announcement blog post and the quote, I still think that anyone who expected Codeberg to replace their private use of GitHub was fantasizing. They already stated their mission is to be a community-led forge for FOSS.

Maybe we could blame them for having lowered their ambitions around "lesser" FOSS, but then again the economics are changing.

[JD557]

Even looking at the comments from that thread and the Codeberg page at that time in archive.org, I don't really see much that points to it as a proper GitHub alternative, other than the editorialized (I think) post title.

Which I think might be the cause of confusion here. I suspect that there was never an official statement (or intention) of Codeberg being a full GitHub replacement, but since a lot of people recommended it as an alternative to GitHub, it started to be seen that way.

I'm happy to be proven wrong, though, as I'm quite confused about the outrage about Codeberg's decision. At least in my mind, Codeberg was already a highly opinionated forge (with the private repo ban and all), so this was not much of a surprise.

[inigyou]

What even is a "GitHub alternative"? By starting the discussion from an existing product instead of one's actual needs, one has already lost.

[noodletheworld]

That thread is from 2020.

Times change.

Free services owe no one, anything. If you are joining a community, be respectful.

If you're not, and you get banned, that sucks. If it causes a whole category of your peers to be banned that sucks too.

…but its a bit rich to say, oh yeah, the promises you made before LLMs were a thing didn't include a note saying “except if you spam AI generated code”.

Come on.

They dont owe anyone anything.

Certainly not for some comment from ten years ago.

This could entirely legitimately be a case of “was this decision made the right way according to their own decision making process?” … but “is it ok for then to have made this decision?”

Yes. Its fine. It’s their platform. They can do whatever they want.

[lifthrasiir]

The OP said the Mandela effect [1] which is definitely about the past event. Anyhow, I'm okay with Codeberg's decision (I'm not even its stakeholder, so what can I say about that anyway) but it has to be honest about the intent. If its definition of "F/OSS" has changed, do say so.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory#Mandela_effect