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Moving away from GitHub readiness plan #4551
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I've had success hosting GitLab on-prem internally for years. Their upgrades and updates for me at least have never been problematic, but then I don't use a tenth of the "devops" deploy stuff. However, about the time I was finally ready to migrate from GitLab's on-prem to their cloud, they suddenly did a huge price-hike almost overnight. They have had even more changes since then. Some people had invested heavily in their product due to the features and reasonable prices... suddenly many were left with double or triple the monthly cost. Since then, I've been wary of their motivations. I have a separate instance of Gitea which I keep fully updated and ready for the moment when either I get time to convert over, or GitLab pulls some other stunt. However, Gitea has its own "potential" issues with the community. This happened back in Oct 2022 and I'm not sure why people were so upset, but nevertheless... https://blog.gitea.com/open-source-sustainment/. However, of all the ones I've tested, I keep coming back to Gitea for the simplicity of maintenance and "enough" features. "AI" is the new "Cloud" is the new "whatever". People are required to market it like crack and I see it turn up literally everywhere, even when it has no place being there whatsoever. |
The energy from the broader community still seems to be with GitHub, so I think it makes sense to stick with it until such time as there is a large pivot to another service. While some of the other alternatives that have popped up seem attractive from time to time, they all suffer from the main issue of needing to make enough money from the service to stay alive as a company, and they have consequently made disruptive changes to their platforms as a result. That's hard to rival Microsoft in this space. |
Lately, there is a new project that aim to create a true community-driven open-source alternative to big platform like github or gitlab. Forgejo is an active fork of Gitea, supported by codeberg https://forgejo.org/. I think it's great but you will need to find the right 3rd platform to host you, or host it your self. |
Thanks @jsreynolds @c0shea @lefuturiste for your input here. @jsreynolds I also used to maintain a GitLab instance for a while, and also become wary about their motivations over time, when seeing their choices & their categorization of what goes into the open offerings. I'd generally want to keep away from anything VC-funded nowadays. @c0shea I agree that it makes sense to stick with GitHub for now, I just want to be ready so that process of pivoting won't be too painful, or we're not overly tied down by GitHub. GitHub recently doubled-down on their AI commitment, with the following:
Overall, if we were to move, I'd probable prefer to use an existing site like codeberg, rather than self-host, to avoid having an extra platform for us to maintain, and to contribute (via donations and user-base) to their establishment/growth, and to use a site that might have established users (or at least be familiar with users). Over the last few days I've been thinking specifically about the GitHub-based git URL that's currently used to pull the code, and how we can put that under our control so it doesn't matter what platform we're using for management. Just testing for now, I've hosted some mirrors of the repos here: https://source.bookstackapp.com/ The HTTP UI is not really meant for project management/develop, but does serve as an alternative for people that would prefer to avoid third parties to browse the codebase and version control in the browser. |
This is not something I've decided to action or currently plan to go ahead with, I just think it's wise to think and plan something like this through in the event we want/need to migrate. Better to be ready in such circumstances.
This post is intended to evolve over time.
Motivation
As time goes on, and as GitHub develops under Microsoft, it feels increasingly uncomfortable to be on the platform.
Here are some of the reasons for this in the context of managing BookStack:
At the time of writing, none of these reasons have been specifically raised to me as concerns from community members, and none specifically are major to the point where I think a change is required, but they show an unfavourable direction I'd like to be prepared for if it continues.
Benefits of GitHub
There are some benefits we get from GitHub that it's important to consider:
Our Attachments to GitHub
The below list the ways that the project is entwined with the GitHub platform, that we'd need to consider for potential migration:
Note: Actions & potential plans are not listed for these yet, but I plan to outline ideas for those out in future. I am aware for each of these there will be solutions and options.
Alternatives
Here are potential alternatives along with my very high-level thoughts:
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