Stop using gitlab.com for projects - Credit card info required for new registrations

vivi@lemmy.ml to Linux@lemmy.ml – 457 points –

If your IP (and possible your browser) looks "suspicious" or has been used by other users before, you need to add additional information for registration on gitlab.com, which includes your mobile phone number and possibly credit card information. Since it is not possible to contribute or even report issues on open source projects without doing so, I do not think any open source project should use this service until they change that.

Screenshot: https://i.ibb.co/XsfcfHf/gitlab.png

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Do what should I use?

https://codeberg.org/

I would LOVE to switch to codeberg for work, but my work requires that all data be hosted in the US, so I recently pitched GitLab as an alternative to GitHub, even though it's not perfect.

For work gitlab is fine, I'm sure your company can get the accounts verified for example. At least it's not microsoft

Wait. Wtf does it need to be US specifically? So the goverment has full access to the data or what?

Probably so other governments don’t have full access.

Well, EU or some countries like Switzerland dont allow themselves access to the service.

Export controls or legal compliance, most likely. Export controls because the code may be a protected technology, or compliance because the company doesn't have gdpr or some other legal framework.

In which case, get your code off the net and use Forgejo to get your own instance, same as codeberg. If hosting location is a real issue, bring it home.

That's eventually the plan, but I expect that process to take on the order of a year, unfortunately.

git clone and say that code is on your computer

What's your experience like with this? I'm seriously considering Gitlab & Github alternative.

Codeberg the community is very nice with strong focus on the right to privacy and free software, which I feel reflects itself especially in a lot of copylefted projects on the service.

Codeberg the collaboration platform is in my epxerience by the simple fact of critical mass quite a bit less 'collaborative' for many projects. There's a couple projects with tight communities, and a lot of single dev projects with maybe a drive-by PR.

Codeberg the software runs on Gitea (/Forgejo) which is wonderful software - slim, simple enough to get everything done without being in the way.

There's efforts to open up the gitea/forgejo forges to federation, which would be a very neat way to fix the collaboration issue and is - in my view - the way forward for open, decentralized collaborative software creation. It's still quite a ways off (especially from bring mature enough to be used day-to-day) but when it gets there platforms like codeberg will be the first to adopt it and to also benefit massively from it.

I don't use codeberg much, but I have my own instance of Forgejo so I'm using the same software. My experience is that it's really nice. The feeling is one of having what you need and no bloat.

If you want people to contribute to your project, Github is by far the best. If you're off Github, it reduces your visibility by a lot.

You can host your project anywhere you want, setup mirroring to github and drop a link in its description. So you'll have github visibility and won't depend on github. Addiitional repo backup is a bonus.

Even just for reporting issues, anyone who is capable of identifying a bug is likely to have a GitHub account. Not so for Gitlab or others.

Then you've got seamless integration with Vscode as a bonus, it's more like why would you not use GitHub unless you have a specific problem with them.

Even just for reporting issues, anyone who is capable of identifying a bug is likely to have a GitHub account. Not so for Gitlab or others.

If you really want to, you can add a "log in with Github" button to your Gitlab server: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/integration/github.html

I was asked to report bugs by people without github account several times, so you are wrong.

Then you’ve got seamless integration with Vscode as a bonus, it’s more like why would you not use GitHub unless you have a specific problem with them.

Does GitHub still only permit one account? I remember looking into it awhile back and not wanting to get things mixed up between personal/professional arrangements and the one account policy put me off.

I have no idea what everyone is on about.
Host your own git repo. It's trivial and built into git and you make every decision about it from the ground up.
For example you don't need to worry about registrations or what country it's hosted in because the country it's hosted in is your hard drive (or your company's server rack).
Then use whatever front-end you want and point it at that private repo.
It's only mildly more fiddly to set up and grant access, but it sure doesn't ask you for a credit card and it sure doesn't get scraped to train LLMs (unless you make it internet-facing and don't protect it).
If you want to stay close to the core experience but still have a decent interface, check out (heh) gitweb and git daemon. Though I wouldn't mind if gitweb had some of the fancier features, like the "download as zip"/"git clone path/to/branch copy-to-clipboard" buttons.

It is not trivial to host a git forge with modern features that allows easy collaboration between anonymous users all over the world.

Git forge?
Just git. Git command line.
It's about as trivial as setting up an Apache server.
The anonymous users part is maybe two lines in a config file.
The features are almost entirely part of the front-end, which is entirely up to each individual end-user.
Do you have a web server? You're already 95% of the way there. A workplace was mentioned in other replies, which likely means this infrastructure is already in place.

So no PRs. No Issues. No CI/CD. That doesn't work for 99% of actively developed open source projects with >10 devs

I know project that is developed by 10.00000001 devs

The difficulty of sending patches or reporting issues to the Linux kernel is a feature for them, as it keeps less-experienced devs from wasting maintainer's time with garbage requests. For most projects it's a bug.

Linus accepted patch from literal child. But to be fair it was documentation style patch from one of kernel dev's kid.