If your IP (and possible your browser) looks “suspicious” or has been used by other users before, you need to add additional information for registration on gitlab.com, which includes your mobile phone number and possibly credit card information. Since it is not possible to contribute or even report issues on open source projects without doing so, I do not think any open source project should use this service until they change that.
Screenshot: https://i.ibb.co/XsfcfHf/gitlab.png
I have no idea what everyone is on about.
Host your own git repo. It’s trivial and built into git and you make every decision about it from the ground up.
For example you don’t need to worry about registrations or what country it’s hosted in because the country it’s hosted in is your hard drive (or your company’s server rack).
Then use whatever front-end you want and point it at that private repo.
It’s only mildly more fiddly to set up and grant access, but it sure doesn’t ask you for a credit card and it sure doesn’t get scraped to train LLMs (unless you make it internet-facing and don’t protect it).
If you want to stay close to the core experience but still have a decent interface, check out (heh) gitweb and git daemon. Though I wouldn’t mind if gitweb had some of the fancier features, like the “download as zip”/“git clone path/to/branch copy-to-clipboard” buttons.
It is not trivial to host a git forge with modern features that allows easy collaboration between anonymous users all over the world.
Git forge?
Just git. Git command line.
It’s about as trivial as setting up an Apache server.
The anonymous users part is maybe two lines in a config file.
The features are almost entirely part of the front-end, which is entirely up to each individual end-user.
Do you have a web server? You’re already 95% of the way there. A workplace was mentioned in other replies, which likely means this infrastructure is already in place.
So no PRs. No Issues. No CI/CD. That doesn’t work for 99% of actively developed open source projects with >10 devs
I know project that is developed by 10.00000001 devs
The difficulty of sending patches or reporting issues to the Linux kernel is a feature for them, as it keeps less-experienced devs from wasting maintainer’s time with garbage requests. For most projects it’s a bug.