Updated 23-Jun-2026
Git itself
- Oh shit, git!
- Git book
- Oh shit, git! book (not the same as either of the above)
Git platforms
Git is great, and even better as a core part of a full development / deployment toolchain. These days there are choices as to which more robust Git platform to use. First, those not to use:
- Github (owned by Microsoft), proprietary
- Gitlab (owned publicly traded company), open core
- Codeberg (privately owned, shit governance), uses Forgejo, a fork of Gitea
All of these are worrisome for privacy, uptime, and AI scraping issues, and in the case of Codeberg for freedom of use.
Open source Git platforms
There are two main players, though others on the periphery:
Note that both are free to use for open source projects (well, Sourcehut is in alpha and so does not enforce payment, but definitely permanently free-to-use for projects already on Sourcehut, and they also offer reduced fees for financial constraints).
Gitea
Gitea is kind of strange as it does its own work on Github (rather than itself), however it has a fairly similar set of services and offers free-to-use for open source projects. It itself is open-core, which means you can self-host the core product freely and open-sourcely.
If one things Github and/or Gitlab is a bridge too far or merely a necessary evil, it is not required to stay there, merely to participate there minimally. For one's own projects, Gitea makes a lot of sense, or in any case as the primary location with Github mirrors (or vice versa for Github repos that one wants to fork and sync).
Sourcehut
Sourcehut is a small group of devs and a company, which also release their toolset open source (though currently only available for Alpine linux).
Sourcehut is useful and allows for hosting of private and public repositories for a low price. They offer transparency on their income and expenses.
In general, a good project to get behind. But for me, they kind of do things a bit too differently, as I started with Github and Gitea feels a lot more natural.
Codeberg / Forgejo
While Codeberg and Forgejo are two different things, the Codeberg organization controls the Forgejo name and domain assets. Forgejo is a hard fork of Gitea, after Gitea transferred its name and domains to a private individual, and is different in a few ways. While Gitea still offers web services, not all of it is open source, and therefore like Gitlab it is open core.
Codeberg is a SAAS for free and open source project git hosting (using Foregjo, of course).
Forgejo is open source and there are binaries for a variety of Linux distributions.
Comparing Forgejo to Gitea, Sourcehut, Gitlab and Github is quite useful., though frankly if you use a bullshit checker you realize that Forgejo is full of it, and basically did a hostile fork. They essentially are able to commandeer the Gitea resources. I've seen this again and again with the Codeberg folks. Yes, it is true open-source can be forked, but these are hostile forks which are dismissing and disingenuous. See also: I'm not sure if I'm a fan of the "no AI fork, created 6 hours ago" genre of post here, e.g., KeePassXCX.
Bottom Line
Gitea and Sourcehut are great, open-core or open source, can be self-hosted (largely), and offer free services to open source projects. Partly a choice will be based on style preference. Of course, both can be used without too much trouble, though that seems a bit redundant.