Free Software Foundation Aims To Launch Code Hosting / Collaboration Platform This Year

The Free Software Foundation is planning to launch their own public code hosting and collaboration platform in 2020.

The Free Software Foundation "Forge" will complement their existing and aging Savannah servers used for code hosting. The Free Software Foundation isn't looking to develop their own hosting/collaboration platform as an original GNU project but looking at an existing free software solution they can adapt for their purposes.

The Free Software Foundation team is currently evaluating options based on practical and ethical criteria such as whether the JavaScript is deemed free software with LibreJS, and other stringent free software requirements.

While GitLab is widely used by a number of open-source projects rather than GitHub, GitLab was already ruled out by the Free Software Foundation. The FSF doesn't like GitLab in that it still uses Google ReCAPTCHA, various items they say would cause them to need to fork GitLab itself, GitLab being "quite complicated", and other non-free/ethical issues.

The Free Software Foundation's lead contender right now is using Pagure as the basis for their platform, but have some reservations over it since JavaScript is required for a pleasant experience. Gitea and Sourcehut are other options they are also exploring but have pros/cons for all of them.

More details on the FSF's ongoing effort around coming up with a new code hosting platform can be found via today's announcement on the FSF.org blog.