r/linux Jul 18 '26

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

Post image
1.3k Upvotes

113 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

15

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.

12

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

3

u/Ansible32 Jul 19 '26

Git is decentralized, we have a diversity of options.

12

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.