Forgejo

Forgejo is a software forge — repositories, issues, pull requests, Forgejo Actions CI, a package and container registry, and releases — distributed under GPLv3 and built as a drop-in replacement for Gitea, which it was forked from on 15 December 2022. The fork happened because Gitea’s development had been taken over by a newly formed for-profit company without consulting the community. That rationale has since hardened into a jurisdictional one: Gitea is now published by CommitGo, Inc. under California law.

The project is backed by Codeberg e.V., the Berlin association that also runs the Codeberg hosting service on it. Codeberg holds the Forgejo domains and supplies resources, but Forgejo’s governance is separate, and it applies for its own grants — mostly from the Dutch NLnet foundation. No Forgejo trademark is registered. The current releases are the 16.x line and 15.0 LTS, supported into July 2027.

It runs from a single Go binary on modest hardware, which is the practical argument for it: a small team can host a complete forge on one server, with its data on disks it controls. The equally practical argument against is that you then operate it — upgrades, backups, spam and uptime — and none of the ecosystem around GitHub comes with it, from Copilot to the Marketplace to the pool of reviewers who already have an account.

Codeberg e.V. is a German registered association at Arminiusstraße 2-4, 10551 Berlin, entered in the register of associations at the Amtsgericht Charlottenburg under VR 36929. Otto Richter, Moritz Marquardt and William Zijl form the executive board. The Berlin tax office for corporations recognised the association as tax-privileged and non-profit on 23 June 2020, for the advancement of science and research and of education, which lets it issue donation receipts. The legal form settles the ownership question outright: there is no owner to take a profit, the budget is voted on by the active members, and cash auditors check the spending against the bylaws.

Funding comes from members and donations rather than from a sponsor. Supporting and active memberships start at EUR 24 a year and corporate membership at EUR 100, while using Codeberg itself costs nothing. The association reported 1,691 paying members in May 2026 and published a budget publicly for the first time that month, in its own repository, having spent roughly EUR 300 in its first year of 2019. Its stated reason for caring is that no large sponsor, venture fund or single big customer can lean on its direction.

Codeberg is also the custodian of Forgejo, the software it runs on. Forgejo was announced on 15 December 2022 by former Gitea maintainers, after control of Gitea passed to the newly formed for-profit Gitea Ltd without consulting the community and an open letter went unanswered; the name is the Esperanto word for a forge. The project sits under the association’s umbrella and is exclusively free software, which is also the hosting policy on codeberg.org. In July 2026 the members passed two motions on large language models, committing the association not to use user data for training.