Another “Differences in Linux” question :)
I often wonder, what exactly is the difference between this services?
I understand, that:
- github.com is a company, where as gitlab and forgejo are (softwares)?
- They all “manage/wrap/interface with” git?
Questions:
- what software does github.com use?
- whats the difference between them (pros/cons)?
- what about self-hosting? Possibilities/Preferences?
As always, thanks beforehand :)
Git is the underlying code management and version control system. It can be used directly, and also forms the backend to a number of other systems.
Code “forges” are platforms which integrate a version control system (like git), a code repository (a file server), and front end utilities.
Some git forges are open source, others are proprietary. Certainly with the open source ones, but also with the proprietary ones in some cases, you can either self-host or use a hosted service.
GitHub is a proprietary forge, and GitHub.com is the company’s fully hosted service. They’re now owned by Microsoft.
Gitlab is an open source forge. Gitlab.com offers a hosted service, but many projects self-host.
Forgejo is a fork of Gitea which is a fork of Gogs. These are all also open source. As far as I know, neither Forgejo nor Gogs offer a hosted version, but Gitea does.
A few other notable forges include GNU Savannah (open source), Bitbucket (proprietary), Sourceforge (proprietary), Launchpad (open source), Allura (open source).
At the end of the day, they all do the same thing. They have different feature lists (especially around some of the project management and user interaction side), different user interfaces (some are shinier and more modern, others more minimalist), and different communities and support models. You choose that one that works best for your needs.
GitHub is probably the most feature-rich (and/or bloated) of them. GitLab is competing in the same space, and self-hosted GitLab seems to be something of a sweet spot for many projects that want a premium experience without needing to use a proprietary Microsoft product. I don’t have much experience with Forgejo or Gitea. The rest tend to exist in their niches.
Forgejo hosted version is https://codeberg.org/ which is my code forge of choice. I also have a self hosted private forgejo mirror of my public codebeerg repos.
Edit: spellings
Same here and I’m happy with that
i’ve heard that they’re quite hostile to piracy stuff , but it’s also easy to self-host
gittea is also a company now, forgejo is open and free, trully free
other than codeberg disroot has been running forgejo too I wouldn’t want to use anything but forgejo
Truly free… yet in its fork of Gitea it is copying more Microsoft GitHub features like Action YAML spaghetti instead of offering an improvement. Instead of being a better offering than Microsoft, they are cloning even more features where it is even more of a hard sell IMO by not offering anything new in the experience.
The difference with a small group of devs writing code and offering it free and corporate thugs treating coders like sponges to produce code is the lack of resources can be understood and forgiven. Take a project like brave-nightly (browser fork of glugle-elechrom) there are 3-5-8 new releases a day, 8-6 Pacific US time, when they go home on Fri. the next release is Monday afternoon, the “free” coders usually begin work Friday night and end Monday at dawn!
Sure, corp.XYZ sends them an offer one day and buys their work and even offers them incentives to work for them, then it all goes down hill!
It ends up being as nasty racist and ethnocentric as kernel.org.com - us state dept fed and controlled
Even Codeberg is not running Forgejo Actions, which is saying something (it’s super janky, many things just don’t work)
It is a fool’s errand to try to chase Microsoft like this—folks will demand compatibility with all their new Copilot-enhanced CI. Present something better please—this would entice users to leave.
tbh do we even have a standard for an open CI/CD specification format?
GitLab is open core, not open source. It is also a publicly-traded company in the US that does have shareholder obligations—which should cause some sort of long-term hesitation. It does have a better CI/CD system than the Microsoft product & the community edition can be self-hosted.