this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2025
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I love that Codeberg exists, but there's one thing I kinda dislike.
I'd like to use the same forge for my private projects (hey, a couple of them may make money one day! I gotta eat too) as I do for open source stuff, but Codeberg is explicitly open source only.
It's a minor thing, really. Which I could get past by using another Forgejo instance, like Codefloe. But these smaller instances, how long will they be around?
I suppose just running my own git server, with or without a forge attached to it, for private projects, is the only real solution. But then I have even more things to self-host lol
I see this as a feature not bug, and tbh kinda resent those who hoard information and try to extract wealth from it. Extremely rude to the giants whose shoulders your work is built on. I'm the person who's going to crack and redistribute your shit as soon as you publish it, nice to meet you :)
Out of curiosity, how do you crack and redistribute backend code as soon as a service is published?
Client-side code is usually Javascript for everything made in the last 10 years anyway, it doesn't need a lot of cracking lol, it's usually just minimized.
Anyway, say I'm building something that has taken me years of working in a specific industry to even be able to understand the requirements, that's only useful for companies (NOT private individuals, though some companies may only have 1-2 employees, but many will have thousands). There's literally no way it would benefit a private individual because for the 10% of it that overlaps with things private individuals also do, there's already great open source solutions. What exactly is the problem with charging money for it, given that it's ONLY going to be used by for-profit companies who are themselves charging money for their services?
Not really a project that would benefit normal people. You and I would have no use for it.
That was somewhat facetious and self-aggrandizing, "cracking" something isn't always possible or necessary. If your service was unique/useful enough, I would contribute to reverse engineering enough of that backend to replicate its functionality. More likely I'd just refuse to use it and support open alternatives
Unsolicited advice though, giving stuff away generates a huge amount of goodwill that can be way more useful and rewarding than revenue. Contributors instead of employees, love instead of money, place and purpose instead of points in your bank account. I'm not wealthy by any means, but I'm comfortable enough and haven't had to buy a laptop since high school
You:
Also you:
My brother in christ that's the exact line I was referring to, what else in the wide world of reading comprehension do you think I was talking about?
Sounded to me like you were firing off at someone for having a private personal project by claiming that you would personally intervene to prevent them making any money from their code, then later you told them that they were being self aggrandizing. That's how it comes across.
You doubled down on your threat with detail, which doesn't give readers the context to be able to deduce that you meant to be in the slightest bit self aware or apologetic, so without re-quoting yourself, it came across as hypocritical.
Maybe "sorry, that was somewhat facetious and self-aggrandizing of me" and then not doubling down might have come across better. That's what I think, anyway.
Pretty sure I was having a normal conversation with someone and you splashed in to call me out for something without a whole lot of thought. There's no "threat", none of this is that serious, I wish you peace and introspection
Well I'm petty sure you were coming across as obnoxious and the vote count seems to agree.
If most people are interpreting the things you said earlier in the thread negatively, maybe the cause is in the writer than the reader.
Maybe have another look and see if you mightn't have written a bit of a sourpost originally, and reconsider your tone next time if you genuinely mean no harm.
Some of us need to earn a living from coding, and I don't like the idea that you would rather destroy the earning potential of a one-person team than compromise your politics at all even a little bit.
Turn your hatred on the exploitative multinational corporations, not the little guy trying to earn a living from his code.
There's principles, and there's actual people, and the people are far, far more important. Don't be so quick to condemn the little guy for wanting a bit of cash while Besos and the like screw us both over on the daily with billions in their pockets.
People aren't corporations, and confusing those is partly how America got so extreme in its capitalism.
Sure. But thing is, there's software out there for which FOSS doesn't even make much sense.
I'm talking things that are so niche, the total amount of potential users (not customers - that's a much smaller number) is in the hundreds of thousands, not even millions - most of whom have no say in what software they use, nor does it affect their pay checks.
If I was building, say, accounting software that every company can use, that'd be different, because while still business focused, there'd be a lot more grass roots interest in it. But I'm talking about software where you have to sell it to a bunch of execs, along with support contracts and uptime guarantees, because their entire business is dependent on it functioning properly. I'm also talking about software for one niche of one industry in one country.
The project isn't useful enough to you, an engineer, to reverse engineer the backend. Nor are there any open alternatives that work. It requires keeping up with regulations, including some that change every year. It's not that the software itself is super complex magic, it's that it stops being useful if not well-maintained.
What I have considered, though, is making parts of it open source, and keeping only the "secret sauce" proprietary. The open source parts would be stuff that could be used to build similar software for other niches of the same target industry, whereas the super specific niche stuff and all the regulation compliance stuff (much of which is just for that one niche anyway - other niches have different regulations) would be proprietary. Essentially building a set of FOSS libraries, and a niche proprietary application that uses them to service a specific market. Again, good reason for using a forge where you can have both public and private projects - but of course I could just use CodeBerg for the open source and host the rest of it privately.
I'm only building this in my spare time and fairly slowly because I have to do work that gets me paid though. I don't know if I'll ever have an MVP I could show investors or clients.
This seems perfectly reasonable and I wish you the best of luck. Just don't expect anyone to provide the infrastructure for your proprietary secret sauce for free!
Well, github would provide it for free. Their business model is that just hosting shit is free, but costing them actual server resources means you gotta pay 'em. And that's a sensible business model IMO, but unfortunately they're also owned by Microsoft, which I didn't even like 2 decades ago, let alone now that they're pushing AI.
Guess what I'm hoping is for Github alternatives, potentially based on Forgejo, to adopt a similar business model (free storage, paid runners beyond a very limited free tier essentially), without the whole using everyone's code for AI training part.
I also have no problem with a small recurring donation. But the ironic part here is that I wouldn't want to use a forge that's so small that it NEEDS the donations. I don't want it to disappear after a year.
Someone might spin that up, but it feels unlikely. Github was always kinda subsidized as a power play on MS's part, and now that it's well established enough they're squeezing it for ROI. An instance that doesn't need your donations still needs resources to perpetuate itself from somewhere, I'd personally rather depend on infrastructure that was transparent about that (whether paid or donation based) than be treated as the product
Github existed for like 10 years pre-microsoft. Though they did get an investment from Shitreessen Fuckwitz after a few years. Before that, they actually earned enough money on their own to keep the lights on.
I meant more that I'm willing to use an instance after it already has enough recurring donations OR paid users to sustain itself. Because at that point they don't need to treat you as a product to save their own asses, nor are they likely to go bankrupt. So I meant the ironic part is that I'm willing to pay, but for an instance that's doing well enough that it doesn't desperately need my money to keep the lights on.
I guess I'm just a little more pessimistic at this point, don't actually know the specifics of their financials but assumed github had been operating at a loss the whole time. That's pretty typical for startup stuff in general and especially so for "free" services, if it seems too good to be true it probably is type thing. I see forgejo's transparency and ideological commitment to open source as a defense against that type of behaviour cropping up in the future, hence "feature not bug". Like you said, it'd be trivial to host your private repositories elsewhere or for someone to spin up their own paid instance for commercial use. I'd be a little suspicious of what was keeping the lights on if someone directly replicated github's model because, well... look how it's going!