Github [LWN.net]

Github

Posted Jun 11, 2025 16:40 UTC (Wed) by Klaasjan (subscriber, #4951)
In reply to: Overleaf by leephillips
Parent article: The importance of free software to science

Since you disqualify GitHub and Overleaf in the same sentence, this makes me wonder what alternatives to GitHub you would recommend, in particular to users (scientists) that want to collaboratively develop software using (mainline) git from their local machines.

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Github

Posted Jun 11, 2025 19:07 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (4 responses)

I migrated off GitHub to two other solutions:

Codeberg
A self-hosted Forgejo installation.

I also mirror my repos on salsa.debian.org, but that's not freely-available to anyone; you need to apply for an account and (AFAIK) be developing free software. That runs the Gitlab software, which you can use as a service or self-host.

Github alternatives

Posted Jun 12, 2025 9:34 UTC (Thu) by Klaasjan (subscriber, #4951) [Link] (3 responses)

Thanks. I should have mentioned that the request was for a non-self-hosted solution. I'll look into Codeberg.

Github alternatives

Posted Jun 12, 2025 12:22 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

Gitlab.com also hosts a free tier, though it says that it's for "individuals working on personal projects and open source contributions."

Github alternatives

Posted Jun 12, 2025 12:55 UTC (Thu) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link] (1 responses)

I like Codeberg. You might also look at sourcehut, too. It is a bit more... baroque? All its features are supposed to work without JS (it works well with Nyxt, for instance), and it is 100% free software.

Github alternatives

Posted Jun 12, 2025 14:05 UTC (Thu) by liw (subscriber, #6379) [Link]

While we're listing alternatives: I work on, and use, Radicle, which is distributed, is fully free and open source software. There's also Tangled, another take on distributed, but built on ATproto, which underlies Bluesky. (For personal reasons, I only care about distributed systems for this.)