Letter from Codeberg: Onwards and Upwards

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(This is a stripped-down version of the newsletter sent out to Codeberg e. V. members as an email. The version emailed to our members contains some additional details concerning the association's Annual Assembly. If you are interested in helping us shape Codeberg, consider contributing or participating our non-profit association! Strength comes in numbers; we could always use your support!)

Dear Codeberg e.V. members and supporters!

It's time to share some news about what has happened in the past months around Codeberg.

Highlights

Codeberg e. V. held its Annual Assembly, and elected a new Presidium, which in turn appointed a new Executive Board.
We reworked our Privacy Policy and clarified our policies on repository licensing in our Terms of Use.
Intra-association meetings are now held regularly.
We now have a second part-time employee.
Hardware updates!

A brief status update

Codeberg has experienced immense growth over the past few months. Here's a rundown of our numbers:

Codeberg e.V. now has more than 1000 members (1208, to be exact).
- 786 members have active voting rights, 415 of them are supporting members and the remaining 7 are honorary members.
- Out of the 1208 members, 61 of them are corporations (which can only have a supporting membership without voting rights).
We now have more than 300k repositories and recently crossed 200k registered user accounts.
Some more well-established projects now have a presence on Codeberg.
As of September 2025, Anja joined us as a part-time employee to help us with administrative matters. We now have two part-time employees.

Annual Assembly & Elections

Once every year, the entire member body of Codeberg e. V. members meets in what we call the Annual Assembly. It guarantees that the matters of the association are in the hands of its users. Codeberg e. V. has more than 1000 individuals backing it.

Once every two years, the Assembly elects up to eight members to the Presidium. The Presidium meets a few times every month to—as the name suggests—preside over matters involving Codeberg's direction. Such tasks may involve implementing proposals that were accepted by the Assembly, answering emails and responding to media inquiries and organizing teams of volunteers. The following people were elected for the 2025-2027 term in alphabetical order:

Andreas Reindl (@crapStone)
Andreas Shimokawa (@ashimokawa)
Daniele Gobbetti (@daniele)
Daphne Preston-Kendal (@dpk)
Moritz Marquardt (@momar)
Otto Richter (@fnetX)
Panagiotis Vasilopoulos (@n0toose)
William Zijl (@gusted)

Additionally, the Presidium is responsible for appointing an Executive Board, which is responsible and liable for Codeberg's day-to-day operations. With that being said, the Presidium has appointed the following people for the 2025-2026 term:

Otto Richter (@fnetX)
Moritz Marquardt (@momar)
William Zijl (@gusted)

Both bodies were previously exclusively German, whereas the Presidium now comprises of members residing in three European countries and the Executive Board will have a member from the Netherlands. This also marks the first time that our Executive Board has had three members — that being the maximum amount possible.

We strive to be more internationally oriented, as well as adjust to the immense growth we've been experiencing. As such, we have been making efforts in documenting our structures better to help with onboarding.

New privacy policy

We sent out an email to all our users to inform them about our new Privacy Policy that went into force on October 2nd, 2025. In case you missed it, you can check out the commit that we linked here: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/src/commit/2bad44ef35bfc2e154d2c3168bf44d1be739528d/PrivacyPolicy.md

Terms of use

Codeberg is a non-profit organization with the explicit mission of advancing the development of free, libre and open-source projects. It was founded for that purpose, and its continued operation is made possible by all the volunteers, the donors and the members that share said mission. We offer a free service, and what we want to ask from our users is simple: To give back something to the community by letting others reuse, adapt and extend what they create.

In principle, we asked people to make their works "free and open-source". But what is "free and open-source", exactly?

Earlier, our Terms of Use avoided answering that question. Instead, it stipulated that people had to use a license approved by the Free Software Foundation and/or the Open Source Initiative. Therefore, blogs and personal websites licensed under the copyleft Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International were technically against the rules, despite said license being more appropriate than, say, the software-oriented 3-Clause BSD License! We found that our Terms confused or scared away users and use cases that we view as aligned with the Codeberg goals and values: Book authors and artists, conference presenters that wanted to upload their slides, people wanting to use/host public domain content or people that wanted to use copyleft assets for their libre game. Those are cases that we previously quietly tolerated (and were already happy to host despite them not being technically allowed).

We made an effort to provide such projects clarity and make them officially allowed as well. After long discussions with Codeberg e. V. members as well as members of our wider community, we came up with the following proposal, which was formally agreed upon by Codeberg e. V.'s General Assembly and will be implemented soon after publication: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1219

An additional benefit of the changes made is that they reinforce our own governance and independence, as we would not rely on third-party organizations and their governance structures as much as we have. Trying to define what is "free and open-source" was a rather lengthy endeavour. However, we find that this was necessary—especially given the context of our recent growth—and we truly hope that the greater community will be rather pleased with the result.

Regular Codeberg Meetings

As previously discussed among members, we have now established weekly meetings of the Codeberg community. The meetings are open to everyone, but we expect that most people are Codeberg e. V. members.

After a quick round of introduction and some small talk, we usually dedicate our time towards a topic announced in advance, often "open end" and until very late. During the first meetings, topics have been mostly technical, but we aim at addressing non-technical areas in the future, such as community building, the documentation or public relations.

If you have a question or a matter that you'd like to discuss with other Codeberg contributors, you can always join and present the matter during the first minutes of the session. When no urgent and spontaneous topics need to be discussed, we move to the scheduled topic of the session.

The meetings are scheduled every Tuesday evening, 18.00 Berlin time or 17.00 UTC time. We meet at https://lecture.senfcall.de/ott-zml-1vs-qcc. The meeting is open to everyone interested in joining, but we mostly target Codeberg e. V. members

New employee for administrative tasks

Since September 15, 2025, Anja Hänel joined our virtual office team. Codeberg is growing rapidly, and so are the administrative chores required to keep the project running. We are grateful for the expertise she brings into our team, which helped us clarify, simplify and accelerate internal processes around member management and accounting.

Her help relieves Andreas Shimokawa (our current part-time system administrator and developer) from some of the office tasks. Together, they improved the member management and accounting tools. For example, some of you who have outstanding membership fees have likely received friendly reminders recently.

Infrastructure status

Since the last update, there have been some changes to the infrastructure powering Codeberg. We are running on 3 servers, one Gigabyte and 2 Dell servers (R730 and R740). We have bought and added 2 new SATA SSDs (8TB capacity) to the Dell servers to address growing storage demands. This finally balanced storage capacity of the 3 Ceph nodes which was unequal for historical reasons and resulted in inefficient storage usage on the first node.

One of our servers, Achtermann (R730), was running with only 1 CPU (as the second slot had been damaged). While the server was reliable, some workarounds were necessary (such as cramming some hardware into limited PCIe slots, as most of them are bound to the defunct slot). Recently, we received two donated Dell R740s and deployed one of them to replace the damaged R730. Waxenstein (our newly deployed R740) performs much faster than Achtermann (1 CPU, 160GB RAM) and has 384GB of RAM (more than twice than that of Achtermann!). We repurposed the RAM of the now-decommissioned Achtermann and used it to double the RAM of Aburayama, which is the name of the R730 that is still in service. This boost let us allocate much more resources to our various containers, resulting in performance improvements for Codeberg. If you are interested in more detailed and up-to-date information about our hardware, we maintain an overview in the following repository: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg-Infrastructure/meta/src/branch/main/hardware

Hardware donations allow us to get access to high quality hardware. Although aged, the performance (and even energy efficiency) is often not much worse than with new hardware that we could afford. In the interest of saving embodied carbon emissions from hardware manufacturing, we believe that used hardware is the more sustainable path.

We are considering to repurpose older generations of hardware to offsite CI/CD runners. While the hardware is less energy efficient than newer, we hope to use direct solar power to operate CI/CD nodes only during sunshine hours. Using efficient machines for 24/7 operation and less efficient machines for about 4 to 8 hours a day is likely a reasonable approach.

Some users indicated interest in CI runners using the ARM CPU architecture. Currently, Apple's M1 and M2 series have outstanding energy efficiency. We are investigating how broken Apple laptops could be repurposed into CI runners. After all, automated CI usage doesn't depend on the same factors that human beings depend on when using a computer (functioning screen, speakers, keyboard, battery, etc.). If you own a broken M1/M2 device or know someone who does, and believe that it is not worth a conventional repair, we would be happy to receive your hardware donation and give it a try! (Sidenote: There are also non-profit organizations that may be willing to accept your working devices and repurpose them for those in need. For Germany, we'd recommend checking out Computertruhe e. V..)

On a software level, we are currently struggling with recurring performance degradation of our Galera database cluster (MariaDB). While it usually holds up nicely, we see sudden drop in performance every few days. It can usually be "fixed" with a simple restart of Forgejo to clear the backlog of queries. We are still investigating potential issues with our database cluster. In the meantime, work is ongoing to optimize database queries that were observed to trigger the behaviour in Forgejo.

Community Spotlight

To end this letter, we'll share a few (of the many) cool repositories on Codeberg that caught our eye:

git-pages is an alternative to Codeberg Pages, it uses a different approach to serving static pages that is more efficient. Codeberg is planning to gradually migrate to it.
Readeck (Codeberg Link) allows you to preserve web content locally to read it later and find it back easily.
µcad (Codeberg Link) is a description language for creating geometric objects that can be used for 3D printing or CNC milling. Although it is in "an early stage of development" at time of writing, we are definitely intrigued!
ly is a display manager for Linux and BSD (i.e. it provides a "login screen"). It comes with a wave-y animation that may make your laptop look cooler.
GoToSocial (Codeberg Link) is a self-hostable social networking service that uses the ActivityPub protocol.
Typesetter (Codeberg Link) is a local editor for editing Typst documents.