The Forgitry Manifesto

What we believe

Code lives in the open by default. The Go backend that runs Forgitry and the Python SDK that talks to it are open source. Anyone can read them, audit them, fork them, or self-host them. The proprietary parts of Forgitry — our frontend, the SaaS glue, our infrastructure config — are how we keep the lights on. The core is yours.

Your data is yours. We will never sell user data to third parties. Not to advertisers. Not to “AI training partners”. Not to data brokers. Not to anyone. Telemetry is opt-in, minimal, and documented. We collect what we need to run the service. Nothing more.

We will not be acquired by Microsoft. Or Oracle, or Salesforce, or any other firm that treats developer tooling as a customer-acquisition funnel for the rest of its catalogue. If we ever take outside capital, the terms will preserve this commitment. If we cannot run Forgitry sustainably under those terms, we will shut it down before we sell it out.

Sovereignty is non-negotiable. Forgitry is built and operated in the EU. Your code, your CI artifacts, and your metadata stay in EU jurisdictions. No CLOUD Act exposure, no “trust us” cross-border data transfers, no quiet capitulation when a foreign agency comes asking.

Users are in control. You can leave at any time and take everything with you — git history, CI artifacts, MCP configs, audit logs, the lot. Self-hosting the open source parts is a first-class option, not an afterthought we tolerate while pushing you toward the SaaS.

The forge serves the developer, not the platform. No surveillance scoring of contributions. No engagement metrics inflicted on maintainers. No “AI features” that ship your private code to someone else’s model without your say-so. The forge is a tool. Tools don’t manage you.

Why

The dominant forges are good products run by companies whose interests have drifted from their users. GitHub is owned by Microsoft. GitLab is a public company. Bitbucket is Atlassian. Each acquisition or IPO put another layer of agency between the people writing code and the people deciding what the product becomes.

This is not a complaint about any individual engineer at any of those companies. It is a structural observation: when the forge optimises for shareholders, eventually it stops optimising for you.

Linux, Postgres, Debian, OpenSSH, GCC, Git itself — most of the tools we depend on every day exist because someone refused to make this trade. We’d like to build Forgitry the same way: open source where it counts, owned by the people who use it, the four freedoms intact. Whether it earns a place in that company is for users to decide, not us.

We are building Forgitry the other way around from the surveillance forge. On purpose.

How you can help

• Self-host the open source core. Even one self-hosted instance is a vote for sovereignty.
• Donate. Donations fund continued open source development of the backend and SDK independently of SaaS revenue. See forgitry.eu/donate (coming soon).
• Contribute. Issues, patches, security reports, and translations are welcome on the open source repositories. Every accepted contribution is co-owned by the contributor under the project license.
• Tell us when we drift. This document is a commitment. Hold us to it. Open an issue. Send a public letter. Fork us. We earned it.

License of this manifesto

This manifesto is released into the public domain under CC0 1.0. Steal it. Remix it. Sign your own version. Ship it on your own forge.

— Forgitry, 2026