CivAI leaves GitHub for its own open source Forge

CivAI has moved. Not office, but source code platform. Our code is no longer on GitHub, Microsoft’s platform, but on CivAI Forge, our own self-hosted installation of the open source project Forgejo.

Why we are doing this

For years, GitHub has been the obvious choice for software development. It works well, everyone knows it, and most developers already have an account. But it is also an American platform, owned by Microsoft, subject to American legislation such as the Cloud Act. Anyone at CivAI working on software for European governments, educational institutions, and healthcare organisations must consider where that code actually resides and who, under which law, can access it.

Forgejo is the answer we have chosen. It is open source, runs on our own infrastructure, and no one outside CivAI decides where our code is physically located or which legal system it falls under.

What this means for Europe

This is more than a technical choice. Europe has been talking for years about digital sovereignty, about reducing dependence on American Big Tech, about control over its own data and infrastructure. At CivAI, we believe that this sovereignty does not begin with large policy documents, but with thousands of small, practical choices made by organisations themselves. Which cloud service, which platform, which tool.

Every time a European organisation chooses an open source alternative instead of an American platform, that dependence becomes a little smaller. And every time such an alternative proves to work well, the threshold for the next organisation is lowered.

The path we want to show

We are not sharing this to pat ourselves on the back, but because we hope that other organisations, large and small, will seriously consider taking this step. Forgejo is easy to install, runs on standard Linux servers and is cross-platform, without complicated dependencies on an American supplier.

At CivAI, we are already applying this approach more broadly, from local AI inference to European hosting. This move to CivAI Forge is a further, logical step in the same direction.

Image supplied by CivAI