Submitted 4 days ago by MastKalandar@feddit.online to [deleted]
Can I copy repositories from GitHub and save them in my codeberg account for working with them in the future ?
I technically can, but would Codeberg’s policies allow doing such thing ? Codeberg insists on license, but it’s difficult for me to figure out which license is what type of open source license !!
Why not just keep them locally? It’s a full copy of the project, independent of the copy on Github. Git doesn’t need, or even have the concept of, a Big Central Server. It’s just that you can push/pull to/from other computers, and Github is one of those. Your local repository is on equal footing with Github (except for the fact that the project devs don’t consider it official, obviously).
– Frost
Great idea, Frost. It’s just that l’m working on a potato machine.
Hm? Like, lack of disk space or?
If it’s potato in the sense of CPU specs, you don’t need a non-potato machine for this stuff.
Also if you’ve already cloned a project you’ve already got the history (unless you specifically told git not to do that). It generally isn’t huge. So like, you don’t even need tons of disk space unless you want to download a metric buttload of projects and/or they’re weirdly huge and long-historied (I bet the linux kernel repo is pretty big for instance).
– Frost
If the project is open-source, so with a GPL, MIT, Apache, BSD, etc. license, you can fork the project (ideally with attribution of the source).
Look for the LICENSE file on the git repository. If it is not present, it may be on the linked on the README. If there is no license, it means you do not have the right to modify or redistribute the program.
You might also need to be aware if the project has a noncommercial license if you plan on cloning it to another Git repository. Codeberg does not accept commercial projects though, so in this case it’s not an issue.
but would Codeberg's policies allow doing such thing ?
In its terms of use, Codeberg explicitly outlines under what license terms it provides code hosted on it:
You are not allowed to upload code which you do not have permission to publish under these terms. Which means you can't just arbitrarily relicense code you got from Github, and you also can't upload Github projects with a more restrictive license, such as non-commercial ones.
For starters, read licensing from codeberg (including their licensing page that is linked from there. Granted youre not choosing the licenses but there is good info to learn there.
Now codeberg wants free licensing. A good rule of thumb is if it’s an Open Source Initiative (OSI) license then it’s good. For a list of OSI licenses you can check out their page.
There may be other free and open source licenses that people use but if you know nothing about licensing then stick with the OSI ones until you get your feet wet.
You’ll also want to make sure that whatever project you’re using isn’t using dual licensing with non-free parts. If it looks like they have multiple licenses described in their README.md or LICENSE then as a beginner i would just run away as those can be complex and you may not be able to put that code on codeberg
HOWEVER, my advice as someone who uses codeberg as my main forge is this:
My rationale is that part of the open source mentality is being able to give back your code contributions. Putting your code on another forge will make it so you’re not able to do that unless you later add a different git remote to your fork on that forge and then merge (im ignoring the rare unicorn projects that accept contributions via email). That isn’t hard to do but it’s extra steps. If you fork a github project on github then you can still have a local copy in your PC and if the original policy is removed/nuked/relicensed/etc then you could dig into the licensing and see if you can put your local copy on codeberg.
So you advise me to store it in my local system until l’m sure about its license and the policy of codeberg on that license ??
My advice (from above)
- fork projects on whatever platform they are hosted and keep the forks on that platform.
- only put your own original code on codeberg.
So whatever code you are looking at, keep it on that platform if you are forking it.
If you have original code, then you can license it however you want and put it on codeberg if it’s an OSI approved license.
Do you want to set it to “public” then?
Of course.
Then you are the bad guy.
Better keep it for yourself.
slazer2au@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I guess that would depend on the license of the original project.
As for which license to list on CodeB, I would use the same one as the existing license uses but update the readme.md to link back to the original project.