Codeberg Is The Future

GitHub's been my most-used digital service for years. Even interviewed (unsuccessfully) there once. To some extent it had become an online "home" for me. You know that feeling when you've lived in the same place long enough that you can walk into the bathroom in the dead of night and hit the light switch on your first try with one effortless flick of your arm? That's been my relationship with GitHub.

Until now, anyway. Doesn't make sense any more as a European to have your digital centre of operations in America. So I found myself on the market for a replacement. And bloody hell, what a replacement I found.

Codeberg is everything we should have wanted GitHub to be all along. It's democratically governed. It's a non-profit. It's led by its own community. It has a governance model that resembles a really mature and successful free software project rather than a VC cap table.

This is way more important than it might first seem. There's a lot of discourse right now about digital sovereignty in Europe. Codeberg’s democratic governance model has a key role to play in that, I think. The simplistic fantasy of a for-profit European GitHub falls apart when you explore how that company’s profit focus would force it to prioritise money over so-called “soft” values like sovereignty.

We’re unfortunate enough to have a case study demonstrating this. There’s another well-known alternative to GitHub, called GitLab. And GitLab literally originated in Ukraine. Then as the company grew, they moved their HQ to San Francisco in search of ever faster growth. And so now for all their commercial success they’re on the wrong side of the orange curtain. Oops!

So I was really excited to join Codeberg e.V. as a voting member and financial contributor. You’re even reading this post on the Codeberg pages server right now. This is 100% the future of free software and it feels cool as hell to play even a very small role in helping make it happen.