When an organization asks me about Gitea, I would like to direct them to a provider where they can rent an instance and just use it, in the same way they can go to https://discourse.org for a forum, or https://nextcloud.com for storage. Instead of waiting for that to happen, Aravinth and myself decided to do something about it, in a way that is in line with our shared values: transparency and Free Software.
After doing some research we found counter examples that showed the pitfalls to avoid. GitLab because its business model heavily relies on selling proprietary licenses. CiviCRM because setting it up is complex and requires training: users can’t figure it out on their own. Gitea images provided by Digital Ocean because they do not include security upgrades. MySQL configured and run by AWS because of the vendor lock-in that makes it impossible to self-host.
Continue reading “Project plans for a hosted Gitea online service”