First and foremost, GitHub is proprietary software. I value free software very highly, and this alone would have made me attempt moving Clima to another forge, but that's not the only issue at hand. I highly recommend reading https://github.com/toastal/toastal/blob/f%F0%9F%92%80ck-github/README.adoc; it articulates my concerns very well.
Thus, I propose moving Clima to a software forge that actually supports free software values. Here are a couple options:
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Codeberg - this is what I personally use for my projects, and it works quite well in my experience. It uses Gitea, an open-source hosting solution for Git.
Advantages (these apply to any Gitea instance):
- GitHub-like UI and workflow (not all people will view this as an advantage, me included, but it means that it's familiar to people coming from GitHub)
- Seamless migration from GitHub, including issues and pull requests
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Sourcehut - this is an open-source forge with a particular focus on simplicity. For instance, it has no PRs; you submit patches to a mailing list.
Advantages (these apply to any Sourcehut instance, though I'm not aware of any other than https://sr.ht):
- Very simple and light on resources
- Participation in projects does not require an account; you can, for instance, send patches and create TODOs (the equivalent of GitHub issues) by sending e-mails, without any need for an account. I consider this one of Sourcehut's biggest advantages.
Considerations:
- At some point in the future, hosting repos on https://sr.ht will require subscription (to be clear, people can still contribute without a subscription, only hosting repos will require payment). This isn't a bad thing really, but we have to keep it in mind.
- It has no migration tools, so we would lose all our PRs and issues coming from GitHub. This may not be a big problem though if we keep our GitHub repo around as an archive/mirror.
Feel free to suggest other options, such as Gitea instances other than Codeberg and GitLab instances (https://gitlab.com is a no-go though, it has proprietary components).
We'll have to lose CI if we move to either of these platforms (Codeberg requires self-hosting CI, and Sourcehut has CI but it requires payment, though I hear it's pretty good), but I don't think that's a big deal. It's a mere convenience, we can still run checks on the code locally.
Ideally, we would archive Clima on GitHub, but I can reluctantly accept keeping it on GitHub as a mirrored repo. However, the issue tracker would be on whatever forge we move to.
Other things to consider:
- Should we accept PRs on GitHub? I'd say no, but I'm open to discussing this.
@PrestoSole what are your thoughts?
discussion meta