Yeah I can't see a better alternative to GitHub.
OSS can build truly incredible libraries and frameworks. User facing products? ehhhhh not so much.
GitHub has gotten worse over the years but it's not like there's some gold standard open source alternative. And remember, early GH was filled with a pretty amazing group of developers and open source advocates.
If the counter is that, instead of buying github, we could have invested in building some other tool, well, that's not how this works. People need to build what the company is actually building for its users.
At work we've started switching to codeberg (which uses forgejo) and honestly it's a breath of fresh air compared to GitHub. It's blazing fast compared to GitHub and has feature parity with our needs.
Funny how Microsoft products tend to instill blindness over time; refocusing on git hooks (and not the UI) can offer some perspective.
on the other hand, a better user experience is something open source projects can aspire towards as a pure goal, with no perverse incentives pulling them the other way. a lot of the recent github changes have degraded the user experience because that was overall more profitable for the company.
Forge, Gitea, and git itself contains a cgi script with quite a bit of functionality. And of course, the way it is supposed to work, git-over-ssh, as in give committers Linux shell accounts on a shared machine, with the CGI script running for pretty pictures (Remember CGI? You know, "cloud functions" before such a thing existed)
Huh, I should make an Apache plugin that launches docker exported containers uploaded into a directory.
I'm a contractor so have worked on a lot of different projects for different companies, big and small and also early startups.
This is far from truth imo. It is very possible to only use (F)OSS. Github, AWS, Azure, Vercel are not at all more pleasant or easier to work with than on-prem Gitlab/gitea/codeberg/jenkins/k8s/kibana/prometheus/grafana.
I could spend an hour and have a full setup done on physical or VPS to have 1) remote git hosting 2) pipelines running on changes 3) pipelines publishing images or some artifacts 4) automated deployment for these images/artifacts
I'm struggling to see what am I missing. What is worthwhile that Github offers? It is popular and easy to set up org+repos, but that seems it. A few years ago I was working on Azure Devops with the azure pipeline and that was the worst developer experience I've ever had. AFAIK Github actions uses the same syntax and works the same way, at least it was at that time.