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Comment by arp242

1 year ago

Forgejo is a GitHub clone. No one can claim with a straight face that it's somehow completely unrelated.

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.