Comment by baobun
1 year ago
Disagree. Refering to GitHub as category-defining would be antithetical to the Forgejo spirit. Forgejo stands on its own.
1 year ago
Disagree. Refering to GitHub as category-defining would be antithetical to the Forgejo spirit. Forgejo stands on its own.
Disagree. Unfortunately Forge is not a well known category defining term. Using it as a tagline defying the purposes to popularize Forgego.
Yet when posts online described it as an alternative/clone of GitHub/gitlab/gitea it was alsa received with criticism and complains that "what if I don't know what gitea is".
Naming and creating descriptions is not trivial, I wish more complaints would also simply come with proposals of better taglines, so we can bash those ideas quickly in comments and cut that long feedback loop.
Disagree. SourceForge was established in 1999. The term "software forge" was in widespread use, until Github started gaining mainstream attention. But the term "hub" doesn't necessarily always refer to the same thing - e.g. certain adult entertainment website is also using it.
> SourceForge was established in 1999. The term "software forge" was in widespread use...
Not trying to be contentious, but I've got a 5-digit slashdot ID and I've never heard that phrase explicitly used in my entire life as a term of art by software devs, including at or around 1999.
Definitely not saying that nobody was using the term, but "widespread use" is a big claim that requires some substantiation. It absolutely does not align with my lived experience of the time.
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"Software forge" has a certain explanatory ring to it, but approximately nobody has any clue what SourceForge is, or even less, what it represented back in its heyday. The kids know github, many don't even know the difference between github and git, or slighly less concerning, assume git is a tool from github.
You're objectively wrong in this case - look at all the comments in this thread. Clearly "forge" is not a well known category defining term.
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Defining itself as simply an alternative to the mainstream is a not a great way to makes its own identity.
Imagine if Fedora presented itself as simply “an open source alternative to windows”.
Sure, that might be easier to understand for those less in the field, but really doesn’t help it’s own identity.
Forgejo is a GitHub clone. No one can claim with a straight face that it's somehow completely unrelated.
Why Github and not Bitbucket?
Because BitBucket is a GitHub clone itself (I'm not entirely sure if it started out as such, it very quickly turned in to one).
Maybe because Github was there first. BB was created as the GH clone, for mercurial repos.
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Many of us remember life before Github, and web UIs for other version control systems existed before Git. Github is just a Trac clone and no one can claim with a straight face that it's somehow completely unrelated.
Put Trac and GitHub side-by-side, and they're obviously different in tons of ways. Put Forgejo and GitHub side-by-side, and you can easily confuse the two if you're not paying attention.
Of course there are plenty of elements from GitHub that existed in previous systems in some form of the other, and I'm sure the GitHub people looked at them. But the way GitHub implemented things was a marked shift from what came before (the most significant being the "source-first" view of projects – rather than "wiki first" view of Trac of listing of attributes of SourceForge – and their implementation of Pull Requests).
And then all software revision control systems / forges have more or less the same conceptual model for their platform, and just adding their specific sauce and some tailoring to specific needs. Some more innovative and deviating platforms from this more-of-the-same approach are Sourcehut (brutal minimalism) and Gitlab (enterprise dev lifecycle, process support). And then there's the general trend for these platforms to become one-stop-shop maximized lock-in walled gardens, aiming to support the entirety of software development practices (while they seem open and gratis).
PS. This trend for one-stop-shop platforms will also see their owners start to monetize the absolute hell out of their existing (and often vast, take Github) 3rd-party vendor ecosystem via plugin marketplaces, app stores, and their platform API's and SDK's, which many of these vendors now think bring along on a free ride.