Having operated self hosted VCS and CI/CD systems for several organizations, I very much support @firefishy’s call here – as several people have stated, the OWG’s very limited time and resources are best spent on OSM’s unique needs – that is running OpenStreetMap. If the API, OSM.org, and the associated services aren’t running smoothly, there’s really not a lot of value in having a custom setup VCS and CI/CD for them.
However, I think you have some potential avenues to explore:
Given that OSM projects don’t have particularly unique needs in this realm, perhaps there is an existing more general open source consortium that would be interested in taking on the work building out a more open VCS and CI/CD system (or already has), and you could work with them. If not, presumably there are other people in the wider open source community that have similar concerns – and you could start to build such a consortium to take this on.
Alternatively, though many people don’t leverage this much these days, git is a distributed VCS. Nothing is stopping someone from mirroring various OSM related repos on a self hosted git server. Folks who dont want to use github, but do want to contribute to OSM-related projects could push branches or forks to that git server, and then make requests to the core project maintainers to pull branches from that server into the primary repo (i.e. git pull mirrored-origin some-feature-branch). While it might be an annoying ask of a core contributor, it’s certainly less of an ask than having them fully move their VCS and CI/CD.
This would also be a fairly low stakes of getting started with this, since the server wouldn’t be the primary VCS for these projects, there are many things you wouldn’t need to worry about up front. And if this way of working started to take off, perhaps you’d be able to convince various projects to move their primary VCS to that server.
That said, for either of these, someone would still need to take on the expense the server (s) and the work of setting it up and maintaining it.
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