I’ve seen some comments about how “gitlab bad” or whatnot, why do people prefer Codeberg over GitLab?
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Codeberg is fully open source(forgejo) while gitlab has an open source core+community edition but a source available propietary enterprize edition.
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Codeberg is a nonprofit with no ulterior motives. Gitlab is a publicly traded for profit entity with a goal to make profit
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This could just be me, but codeberg feels a lot more transparent. When they have outages, they explain why.
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Super minor, but the codeberg team “self-hosts” their own servers so you only need to trust the one entity rather than additionally trusting the server provider.
self-hosting is great but that still means datacenter someplace. I’ve been using GitLab for some time now and CodeBerg “feels weird” to me. But then it could be my biases and “muscle memory”. I’d say whatever feels right for you.
Unlike other big name Git hosting company who chose to use AI to “steal” from hosted projects other two did not stoop that low. So there’s that.
You are comparing GitLab (the application) with codeberg.org (the website operated by the codeberg e.V. non-profit). A fair comparison would be gitlab.com (the website operated by GitLab Inc.) with codeberg.org or GitLab (Community Edition or Enterprise Edition) with Forgejo (the application powering codeberg.org). They can be fully self-hosted and are both planning to implement AcivityPub-based federation.
Forgejo is working on federation since November 2022.
I trust them, but I just want to have it by myself.
You do realise you can selfhost Forgejo and you do realise Git is actually distributed? You can easily mirror repositories on multiple instances or even your home computer.
gitlab.com is a for profit service/company. They have an open-source community edition of Gitlab which you can run on your own server. Codeberg is a non-profit association running the open-source software “forgejo” for you. At Codeberg you can become a member and then you can vote for important decisions and make proposals. People also care about ethics there. Nobody cares about profit. Codeberg runs on donations from members. I think some people feel more respected at Codeberg because the governing body of Codeberg is a subset of its users. If Gitlab cares about you, then probably because a bad user experience would be bad for business.
Something not mentioned yet: Forgejo, the software running Codeberg, has a smaller feature set and narrower scope than GitLab (“GitLab is the most comprehensive AI-powered DevSecOps Platform” from their website).
Forgejo is much easier to administrate for smaller groups. For example compare the dependencies mentioned in the Forgejo installation documentation and the Gitlab installation documentation.
That’s a bit of an unfair comparison - that’s the GitLab instructions to install from source. Most people use a package (rpm, deb) to install GitLab.
The installation instructions for GitLab from prebuilt binaries is https://about.gitlab.com/install/, and that’s significantly shorter.
That said, I think for most home applications, GitLab is hugely overkill.
Yes that’s true. I guess what I wanted to point out is that GitLab has dependencies like Postgres, Redis, Ruby (with Rails), Vue.js… whereas Forgejo can use just SQLite and jQuery.
sqlite is not something one would use for a database with a lot of users, postresql or mysql/mariadb is a better choice in these circumstances. and i don’t think having jquery as a dependency in 2023 is a positive sign. not sayibg the software is bad, it’s just different.
I assume that’s to build from source.
The times I’ve installed GitLab it’s been a case of dnf install https://.... The rest gets dragged in automatically.
Probably Forgejo/Gitea also uses such dependencies, but their Go counterparts which are statically built into the server binary.
If resource efficiency only depended on that, Gitlab would be more efficient with memory because of this. We all know that’s not the case, I just said it as a comparison.
This also means that while Forgejo/Gitea depends less on your system installation, it also wont benefit from updated dependency packages.
Right. Paid Gitlabs features tend to be targeted as an all in one DevOps platform for larger scale organizations. So how do you do support tickets, CI/CD, feature tracking and coordination for a portfolio of products, documentation, revision control, code reviews, security reviews, etc? In Gitlabs world the answer is Gitlab, with integrations with other enterprise software. It’s HUGE. That said I’ve never heard of an organization (probably due to ignorance not lack of existence) actually doing all of that.
I personally I’m kind of leaning towards building a proof of concept of forgejo, tekton, and maybe Odoo to see if it can cover what my org is actually doing, but he’ll we pay for tons of stuff but the amount of excell sheets floating around doing this is wild…
Ah come on, we all know as software people we can never stop the spreadsheets from being the real data interchange format ;)
Hey, at least remote works been really putting nails in the coffin of printed documents floating around.
But seriously keeping to a good set of tools, providing them at scale and some training will hopefully make the fall back to spreadsheets less attractive to at least the middle wave of adopters.
GitLab is not completely open source. It is owned by a for profit corporation.
Codeberg runs on Forjego which is open source. It is run by a non-profit.
Just curious, what part isn’t open source? I’m running a dockerized instance of it on my local server and have made my own modifications to the rails code in several places to meet my needs closer. Haven’t seen anything that would indicate it wasn’t open source, so just wondering where I should be looking. Unless these comments are related to the .com website and not personal instances
I have found that it was mainly issue and support tracking features that was “missing” from the free community edition of Gitlab.
Ahh okay, so not necessarily the entire software was a whole, but just a few things that would probably be targeted more towards the Enterprise folks? Assuming you don’t mean the issue boards for codebases, but rather the support requests. Probably why I hadn’t noticed, thanks!
I am not sure of the specifics but their website says
GitLab’s open core is published under an MIT open source license. The rest is source-available. Everyone can contribute to making GitLab better. View our transparent roadmap and propose features your project needs.
sourcehut
