Technology

And here’s the thing most people miss:

~robots are writing this junk~

Can I apply for an exemption?

Hi, I'm the brave soul reading it for you.

Currently, the Dutch government's code is spread across GitHub and GitLab, neither of which is under government oversight.

GitHub got ruled out first because it's proprietary software, which directly conflicts with the government's own policy of preferring open source when options are equally suitable.

GitLab made it further in the evaluation but didn't survive it either. The issue was its open-core model, where the Community Edition is genuinely free software but the Enterprise Edition is not.

Forgejo came out on top due to its fully free and open source nature. Licensed under GPLv3+ and governed by Codeberg e.V., a democratic nonprofit, it has no enterprise tier, proprietary upsell, or vendor lock-in problems.

uhm, this is about a Forgejo instance. Which Codeberg also uses...

The idea is very likely sovereignty rather than just an alternative. Overheid.nl is a government website.

Git forges provides a lot of features these days now. From Merge requests, forks, issues tracking, secret branches, to team management stuff.

A lot more stuff gets bolted onto but they are arguably more optional but for some are the point lol

Like ci/cd at the forge level is the best to me for dev centric flows

Are you a git expert ?

The website around it is also just optional. You can dump git repos anywhere you want.

Of course the website is helpful and adds tooling, bit it's an extra nonetheless

Yes, that’s true for the git repo itself, but a git forge can provide a multitude of related services, including issues and pull request management, CI/CD pipelines, wikis, static content hosting, package registries, etc. which are not as easily migrated.

It's the Netherlands. It will have blackjack, hookers, weed and shrooms.

git init blacjack

git init hookers

A) It's forgejo, so any forgejo instance (including Codeberg) can access it (since it's federated.

B) Coordinating something like this eu-wide is much more difficult than in just the netherlands.

Just like the Fediverse, it's actually better and healthier if more people/groups/nations host their own (whether public or private). More diversity, less centralization.

The lack of clean and transparent federation between them is certainly inconvenient but is not a permanent roadblock, it is simply a known and well-understood technical problem that work is ongoing to solve. git itself already has very mature support for complete decentralization and decentralized workflows, it's all of Github's feature layers like user accounts, PR management, issue tracking, CI/CD and the various other workflow and project management layers that may need to be connected and federated across the different Forgejo-based platforms (and hopefully other platforms too in the future). Users and permissions and PRs and issue reporting are among the most critical parts, and I think they are looking at Fediverse's ActivityPub as a method for enabling much of that.

The more large organizations that choose to build their own viable, permanent and financially stable Forgejo platforms, the more attractive and necessary proper federation between them becomes, and the more assured it will become the first-class feature it needs to be.

We are not building a mere Github replacement that drops into its centralized place, wears its shoes and follows its same path to inevitable corporate capture and enshittification. We are building a decentralized standard to be the democratic foundation for future software development and collaboration that no one can, should, or will be able to exclusively control. It's not done yet, but this the right way for it to start so that something like SourceForge (for those old enough to remember that trainwreck) or Github never becomes a problem again.

They do use the same software. I think it is a good idea they run a separate instance, so the hosting costs are automatically covered by the government for the code they develop. This also avoids the centralization on a single provider.

Digital sovereignty. Codeberg is funding development of forgejo. Forgejo will federate to other instances. So you can have your own repo and someone on another forgejo can interact remotely. So no need for centralized platforms anymore. Power of the Fediverse! :-)

From TFA:

GitLab made it further in the evaluation but didn't survive it either. The issue was its open-core model, where the Community Edition is genuinely free software but the Enterprise Edition is not.