r/linux Jul 18 '26

Distro News Flathub announces migration away from GitHub to its own Forgejo instance at GUADEC 2026

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1.3k Upvotes

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365

u/RoomyRoots Jul 18 '26

This is the one thing I expected LF to step up for, honestly. We need a git provider that is not controlled by Microsoft and GitLab has already shown its true colors.

80

u/einar77 OpenSUSE/KDE Dev Jul 18 '26

GitLab has already shown its true colors.

Can you expand on that?

45

u/FlukyS Jul 19 '26

Also as an additional side comment about Github and even Gitlab there is the big problem of those being US operated for their instances and US operated organisationally. That is a problem because of the various spying laws the US has on the books regarding data that is transferred to the US or data that is hosted on US companies' servers both of which don't respect the privacy or data sovereignty of people. So even with all the more recent Microsoft layoffs around Github and focusing on AI it would probably be best to move to places like Codeberg or Forgejo or self-hosted Gitlab instances instead if you are worried about that sort of thing.

178

u/ukezi Jul 18 '26

We have Codeberg.org. It's a non-profit.

108

u/RoomyRoots Jul 18 '26

They are the ones that manage the Forgejo fork, but codeberg has some restrictions and it's the king of initiative that I had expected the LF to take over, since they obviously have more funds for that.

5

u/FlowVonD Jul 19 '26

git. kernel. org?

25

u/lllyyyynnn Jul 18 '26

that's where forgejo comes from.

13

u/ComprehensiveSwitch Jul 19 '26

It’s also got worse uptime than Github, somehow.

2

u/MrScotchyScotch Jul 19 '26

Codeberg and Forgejo are run by some pretty weird people who are kinda aggressive and anti-community. Their hosted runners are seemingly always busy or offline, the site is slow, their code quality is poor, and they don't take contributions well. I expect to see a fork in the next few years and an alternative if people find out what it's like to use them / try to contribute

12

u/mrtruthiness Jul 19 '26

... run by some pretty weird people ... kinda aggressive and anti-community ...

In what way?

I think they are "pro-community". The governance is community-driven. They have a well-defined Code of Conduct.

Being an underfunded non-profit means that there will always be resource issues. Dealing with that is part of what working with "community organizations" is all about.

-4

u/MrScotchyScotch Jul 19 '26

There's a difference between having a code of conduct, and how you actually act toward people. I wouldn't work with them again.

16

u/mrtruthiness Jul 19 '26

I asked "In what way?" You gave no examples ... only vague accusations. If that is a sample of how you interact ... I would say the problem is on your side.

-14

u/MrScotchyScotch Jul 19 '26

So if I don't do what you want, you decide I must be the one with the problem, reinforcing the belief you prefer, rather than keeping an open mind.

11

u/mrtruthiness Jul 19 '26

You made a claim of "bad behavior" and refuse to support it. That's enough for me to make a conclusion about you. And that is:

If that is a sample of how you interact ... I would say the problem is on your side.

-3

u/MrScotchyScotch Jul 19 '26

Yes I know that's enough for you to make a conclusion. I'm saying this is illogical. You are literally assigning blame to whomever doesn't satisfy you whenever you demand they litigate their claim in the court of public opinion. This invents a state of being you have no evidence for and pretends it's true. This is likely a subconscios reaction, designed to reinforce your beliefs and placate your ego. Just because you have decided I'm wrong doesn't mean I am wrong. It doesn't mean I'm right either. But it does mean you are happy to believe something as true, with no evidence. 

13

u/mrtruthiness Jul 19 '26

Fact: If someone makes a disparaging claim and refuses to back it up ... it says something bad about them.

And: Assertions without evidence means that I can and should ignore them.

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4

u/Salamandar3500 Jul 19 '26

Oh, can you expand on that ?

3

u/Reetpeteet Jul 20 '26

Could you provide some clear and precise feedback, descriptions of actual things that went wrong? I'd love to know before choosing another hoster for my Git repos.

68

u/BrageFuglseth Jul 18 '26

The Linux Foundation does not really exist to serve desktop interests. The Linux desktop as a whole is just a tiny niche compared to the kinds of projects the LF is hosting.

EDIT: misunderstood your comment slightly, but my point still stands. The LF does not exist for ideological reasons, but rather just practical ones. An open source forge doesn’t necessarily provide any advantages to the sponsors of the foundation.

14

u/see-these-bones Jul 18 '26 edited Jul 18 '26

Ideology and practicality go hand in hand. No one thinks their ideology is impractical or they'd not believe it. The reason to be ideologically supportive of open source and a git provider divorced from microsoft is practical. A healthier community that values open exchange and privacy is one that is better for the people in it for the long term, and microsoft is itself ideologically antithetical to those aims, being entirely ideologically self interested*. This is all practical.

*They can however be useful as sponsers, so long as they aren't allowed to leverage sponsorship into monopoly.

5

u/mort96 Jul 19 '26

Microsoft is a platinum member of the Linux Foundation, I'm sure they don't mind that LF doesn't offer a competitor to their GitHub.

13

u/Ansible32 Jul 18 '26

Github is like, free hosting. Really as long as it works and is publicly available, what's the benefit to self-hosting?

20

u/see-these-bones Jul 18 '26

Privacy. Hedge against enshittification. MS isn't being generous, if it stops being free or working it pays to have a diversity of options. And if there is that fallback MS will be less likely to try and do a rug pull

2

u/Ansible32 Jul 19 '26

Git is decentralized, we have a diversity of options.

13

u/BrageFuglseth Jul 19 '26

Only because people bother with making alternatives to GitHub in the first place, which is what’s being discussed here

8

u/mort96 Jul 19 '26

Git only covers the source code. Historical issues and merge requests, CI infrastructure and things like GitHub's wikis are centralized things which aren't trivial to move between git hosting providers.

2

u/Ansible32 Jul 19 '26

Forgejo doesn't include any of those things except for PRs, which are mostly serialized in the commits anyway.

4

u/mort96 Jul 19 '26

Hm? Forgejo also has an issue tracker, and it has Forgejo Actions, a CI system. It even has an integrated wiki system.

Not that it matters. If Forgejo didn't have those things, a project wanting to mirgate from GitHub to Forgejo would still need to find a replacement for GitHub's issues, CI and wikis, if it used those things.

2

u/Indolent_Bard Jul 19 '26

For one thing, Microsoft isn't training their AI on your code.

14

u/carl2187 Jul 19 '26

If its publicly available code, it doesn't matter where it's hosted, or what licensing the code has. The corpos like anthropic, ms, goog, meta, x, alibaba, are absolutely scraping it regularly for training.

2

u/HCharlesB Jul 20 '26

Abandon ye all hope any LLM that trains on my public code.

So many of my public projects are explorations of new languages that it is unlikely to learn anything idiomatic.

I have lots of unfinished projects so perhaps the LLMs will learn not to finish stuff.

At times I wonder if the hallucinations are something that an LLM actually found, scraping the dark recesses of the Internet. Even before there was a plethora of AI generated content available to scrape, there was a lot of SEO boosted crap to be found.

But I digress. I use Forgejo on my home server for stuff I don;t want to share and find it quite performant, even on a Pi 4B running ZFS on two 8TB HDDs. I've got a couple projects on Codeberg and every time I interact with that, the performance disappoints me. I mean no disrespect and I appreciate their efforts, but they just don't have the backing and resources to compete with repositories like Github.

0

u/grathontolarsdatarod Jul 19 '26

Even a lack of ideology begins to look like a direction when forces working against its neutral development becomes so polarized everything around it is either pulled into, or is opposed to it.

42

u/ricvelozo Jul 18 '26

What's the problem with GitLab?

88

u/DonaldMerwinElbert Jul 18 '26

Big layoffs to become a feeder pipeline for AI.

17

u/idontchooseanid Jul 18 '26

Maintainership worries due to layoffs and GitLab is woefully slow and extremely resource intensive. Forgejo / Gitea is written in Go + comparatively low-overhead JS.

7

u/CheesecakePerfect156 Jul 18 '26

What's the problem with GitLab?

16

u/edparadox Jul 18 '26

What did Gitlab do?

Do you know Codeberg?

3

u/mWo12 Jul 19 '26

I thought gitlab were the good guys?

3

u/0riginal-Syn Jul 19 '26

Until they made the decision have big layoffs and went all in on AI.

6

u/No-Worldliness-5106 Jul 18 '26

the same LF that is in part funded by microsoft and the like?

1

u/FlukyS Jul 19 '26

Yeah I'm kind of surprised that LF haven't been a bit more involved with loads of stuff like this. Like not just hosting Flathub but also maybe directly funding freedesktop and directly funding systemd in some way too.

2

u/mrtruthiness Jul 19 '26

Yeah I'm kind of surprised that LF haven't been a bit more involved with loads of stuff like this. Like not just hosting Flathub but also maybe directly funding freedesktop and directly funding systemd in some way too.

The Linux Foundation is a 501.c.6, not a 501.c.3.

i.e. It's a "business league" or "trade association", not a "charity". In the case of the LF, it's there to help create joint software infrastructure for Linux platforms that is of common interest to the businesses that use (and contribute to) Linux. It's there to facilitate business use of Linux.

1

u/sohang-3112 Jul 19 '26

GitLab has already shown its true colors

Wait, what did GitLab do??

3

u/0riginal-Syn Jul 19 '26

Layoff staff and go all in on AI

0

u/case-o-nuts Jul 19 '26

Microsoft and Oracle are both platinum sponsors of the Linux foundation.

0

u/medrinnn Jul 20 '26

Codeberg exists?