Codeberg Blog

Additional note on Codeberg, which I think is great as a project, but I got curious on what infrastructure they are running on and how reliable this would be for larger corporate repos.

Nov 22, 2025 https://blog.codeberg.org/letter-from-codeberg-onwards-and-upwards.html

Quotes from their website:

Infrastructure status [...] We are running on 3 servers, one Gigabyte and 2 Dell servers (R730 and R740).

Here's their current hardware: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg-Infrastructure/meta/src/branch/main/hardware

[...] Although aged, the performance (and even energy efficiency) is often not much worse than with new hardware that we could afford. In the interest of saving embodied carbon emissions from hardware manufacturing, we believe that used hardware is the more sustainable path.

[...] We are investigating how broken Apple laptops could be repurposed into CI runners. After all, automated CI usage doesn't depend on the same factors that human beings depend on when using a computer (functioning screen, speakers, keyboard, battery, etc.). If you own a broken M1/M2 device or know someone who does, and believe that it is not worth a conventional repair, we would be happy to receive your hardware donation and give it a try!

[...] While it usually holds up nicely, we see sudden drop in performance every few days. It can usually be "fixed" with a simple restart of Forgejo to clear the backlog of queries.

Gives both early-Google as well as hackerspace vibes, which can or can not…

Gitea Ltd's stance seems to be that it does "custom development" support contracts.[0] It may be a matter of perspective whether you consider this "open-core" or "contract work."

See also their clarifications on Gitea the company[1]:

> Gitea Ltd. will be open to building special versions for special clients and will contribute any features back to the main repository when possible

This was in a followup to the original announcement.[2]

Forgejo (i.e. Codeberg, a FOSS non-profit) maintains that the project should be led by the community, not a company[3]:

> Sadly, Gitea Ltd broke that trust by a lack of transparency: its existence was kept a secret during months. After the initial announcement, Gitea Ltd published another blog post but it was still vague and there has been no other communication since. Who are the Gitea Ltd shareholders? Who, among the Gitea maintainers, are employees of Gitea Ltd?

[0] https://about.gitea.com/pricing/

[1] https://blog.gitea.com/a-message-from-lunny-on-gitea-ltd.-and-the-gitea-project

[2] https://blog.gitea.com/open-source-sustainment/

[3] https://blog.codeberg.org/codeberg-launches-forgejo.html

To be blunt, I think you may have misunderstood the values to begin with. A motion being passed by a majority is a lagging indicator to the values of the membership, so if they changed they will have changed a long time ago.

The Codeberg blog has articles critical of AI published back in September 2024[0]:

If they can use so much power to bring our systems down, imagine how much power they use by doing this to the entire Internet: We are concerned about the environmental and social impact of the current AI hype.
Growth at all costs is something that we, as a non-profit, are not interested in. We believe in frugal computing and that the resources our planet provides are limited. It is no coincidence that we directly "compete" against a company that funnels billions into the AI hype.

[0] https://blog.codeberg.org/letter-from-codeberg-software-is-about-humans.html

We are missing the trees for the forest here. I think that Codeberg is not communicating their core values the best way and my understanding is: to be an open source, ethical, safe home for open source projects under Non-Profit Collaboration Community. If your repo were ever (even temporarily) disabled by a false or intentionally bullying DMCA take down request, you would know right away why every single word in the above sentence is important. And, hosted in Europe, under EU laws.

This is a nice summary: https://blog.codeberg.org/codebergorg-launched.html

Suggestions on how to make the messaging of Codebeberg clearer would be appreciated, Codeberg has an issue about this in their tracker: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/75

Edit: added link to Codeberg issue tracker

I was slightly wrong. You can manually mirror things, but they have removed a feature that allowed one to automatically mirror repositories hosted elsewhere. It was originally intended as an ease of migration tool, but ended up consuming too many resources.

From their FAQ:

> Why can't I mirror repositories from other code-hosting websites?

> Mirrors that pull content from other code hosting services were problematic for Codeberg. They ended up consuming a vast amount of resources (traffic, disk space) over time, as users that were experimenting with Codeberg would not delete those mirrors when leaving.

> A detailed explanation can be found in this blog post.[1]

[1]: https://blog.codeberg.org/mirror-repos-easily-created-consuming-resources-forever.html

> it's for FOSS

It is for FOSS, but they seem to be more restrictive now than even that, and I don't mean by LLMs. To quote their blog post: https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html

> So while the following use cases are discouraged (similar to private repositories), they are likely to be tolerated in practice:
>
> Side projects and experiments with little resource usage
>
> Specific tools and custom scripts that would be unlikely to find a community anyway, even if they were not LLM-generated

I do find that extremely disappointing, that seemingly valid, human-written, compliant FOSS projects are merely "tolerated in practice". I am not storing my code there in any case.