OpenCommit, a forge in Europe

Why this conversation

Most open source code lives on platforms hosted outside Europe. Benoit Schipper is Treasurer of OpenCommit, a non-profit that runs a code forge hosted in Europe. The host recorded with him on 30 October 2026 at the community booth of Dutch Cloud Native Day, at the Jaarbeurs in Utrecht.

Born from a European frustration

“OpenCommit is basically born out of our joint frustration that basically nothing is European or nothing is hosted in Europe.” The idea was a place where the open source community can work together, “in a sovereign place that’s hosted in Europe and that’s not depending on anything in the U.S.” Looking around, they found Forgejo, a fork of Gitea, which Codeberg, a forge in Germany, already runs. “And that basically inspired us to also think maybe we need more forges instead of just having only Codeberg that is there in Europe.” They started the non-profit last year and launched OpenCommit at the beginning of this year.

Hosted in Europe, down to the ingress

OpenCommit is based on Forgejo and runs on Hetzner, in the German cloud. “So everything is hosted in Europe, everything is, as much as we can, everything is European.” Even the ingress, Traefik, is French: the team looks at every technology it uses to keep it in Europe.

One button from GitHub

“We have a one button option to move from GitHub to OpenCommit”, and the CI comes along: “we have a 95, 96% compatibility with your CI”. The host asked whether he could run exactly the same CI as on GitHub. People have done it: one push of a button from GitHub, “and they could run the same CI runners and it worked automatically out of the box.”

Transparent, and free for open source

As an ANBI, a status for non-profits in the Netherlands, OpenCommit has to publish everything: its yearly numbers, its roadmap, what it plans to do. And “everything has to be transparent and that fits really well with our open source mindset.”

For open source developers it is free, “as long as you keep as much of your repository open source, that’s our goal.” The foundation lives off donations, and the team, Benoit and two colleagues “from the field”, works pro bono in its spare time. Companies are welcome, for sovereignty or open source reasons, and for closed repositories there is a commercial licence: “So they pay only 10 bucks a month for, for example, 10 closed repos”. There is no limit on CI time at the moment. OpenCommit provides a runner, “but it’s not obviously the same scale as GitHub. We also don’t have the same users as the scale as GitHub.”

Growing steadily

In less than a year, “we already have 200 users at the moment, about 55 organizations”. “So we’re growing slowly, but we’re growing steadily”. The commercial licence and the donations, from some regular donors too, should let the foundation save up and improve the infrastructure: better free runners, a more scalable and better performing platform.

Where to start

“The best place to start would be opencommit.eu.” There is documentation, a sign-up button on the homepage, and another that says migrate from GitHub, which in some cases takes minutes. The foundation’s own site is opencommit.nl, “if you want to know more about foundation and how you can support there.”

When it comes out

The episode is edited and in the release order. Like every episode it goes out on YouTube first, then on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon Music.