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Joined 22 days ago
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Cake day: November 12th, 2025

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  • I guess I’m just a little more pessimistic at this point, don’t actually know the specifics of their financials but assumed github had been operating at a loss the whole time. That’s pretty typical for startup stuff in general and especially so for “free” services, if it seems too good to be true it probably is type thing. I see forgejo’s transparency and ideological commitment to open source as a defense against that type of behaviour cropping up in the future, hence “feature not bug”. Like you said, it’d be trivial to host your private repositories elsewhere or for someone to spin up their own paid instance for commercial use. I’d be a little suspicious of what was keeping the lights on if someone directly replicated github’s model because, well… look how it’s going!





  • What I have considered, though, is making parts of it open source, and keeping only the “secret sauce” proprietary. The open source parts would be stuff that could be used to build similar software for other niches of the same target industry, whereas the super specific niche stuff and all the regulation compliance stuff (much of which is just for that one niche anyway - other niches have different regulations) would be proprietary.

    This seems perfectly reasonable and I wish you the best of luck. Just don’t expect anyone to provide the infrastructure for your proprietary secret sauce for free!


  • That was somewhat facetious and self-aggrandizing, “cracking” something isn’t always possible or necessary. If your service was unique/useful enough, I would contribute to reverse engineering enough of that backend to replicate its functionality. More likely I’d just refuse to use it and support open alternatives

    Unsolicited advice though, giving stuff away generates a huge amount of goodwill that can be way more useful and rewarding than revenue. Contributors instead of employees, love instead of money, place and purpose instead of points in your bank account. I’m not wealthy by any means, but I’m comfortable enough and haven’t had to buy a laptop since high school