This post was written by BlackieOps President and Founder, Alex Blackie, who is leading the Worktree product development.

Hi, I’m Alex and I’m a software developer. I’ve lived and worked all over Canada, and throughout my career one common thread joined it all together: all our data is in the US. Servers, databases, code, CI – you name it, it’s probably in North Virginia.

Now, of course, there are a lot of historical reasons for this, but it always bothered me. It just felt… wrong. I’m Canadian, my employers were Canadian; why should all our intellectual property be stored in a foreign country?

This annoyance quickly turns into concern as we continually uncover and learn how invasive the US digital surveillance apparatus is, and how unfavourable their policies towards foreign information and internet traffic are. But hey, everyone uses GitHub, what’s the harm, right?

This uneasiness can only be magnified hundredfold when a behemoth comes in and scoops up our formerly-independent friends at GitHub. Now we not only have the US government to be concerned about, we also have their largest tech company with a penchant for unchecked monopolization to contend with. But surely they won’t mess with something as important as GitHub, right?

Well… then Microsoft caught wind of how much they could boost their stock price if they stole everyone’s data and shovelled it into the coal furnace of AI model training. No one’s data or patronage is sacred; we are all here to serve one master: Copilot.

Many people forget because of the GitHub hegemony, but Git is a naturally distributed tool. (Did you know you can have more remotes than just “origin”?!) This effective monopolization of code hosting has warped the minds of entire generations – I have heard peers mistakenly call Git “GitHub” and vice-versa.

But, as the years marched on, we got some serious open-source contenders to GitHub. A lot of free software communities reached for GitLab, which while still a commercial endeavour offers the core of their product as free software. GitLab, unfortunately, has fallen down the same investor-centric rabbit hole of selling their soul to the AI machine.

And recently, we have started to see Gitea instances pop up. Some companies are using it internally to run private code forges for their employees, some groups (like Codeberg) used it to foster new free software communities, especially in Europe.

These endeavours show that we aren’t alone in our growing discontent for American Internet imperialism and Microsoft’s monopolization of developer tools.

If only there was an alternative, say, something that was:

• Competitive in core features with GitHub;
• Had an open-source core;
• Was targeted at supporting business use cases and customers, not just free software;
• Respected its customers’ data and IP rights;
• Could be run independently, domestically, outside of the US; and crucially,
• Was not obsessed with pleasing the daily whims of investors.

Well, that’s what we’re building Worktree to be.

Gitea is a great project. I’ve run it for myself, privately, for many years as a mirror and archive for a lot of my historical projects and as a hedge against GitHub. But it’s not very… commercial. Like most mature open-source projects, it’s a large, legacy, forked-from-an-older-project codebase that has had countless drive-by contributions and half-finished refactors. It lacks a lot of the polish and advanced features that one would expect of a product.

But, by basing Worktree on Gitea, we get a considerable head start in competing with the incumbents:

• Git repositories, LFS storage, code review through PRs
• CI integrations and commit checks
• Integrated package and container repositories
• Task-based project management and issue tracking
• Commit signing with SSH or GPG
• Per-repository wikis
• Social features: forking, starring, explore page, public profiles
• And a bunch more.

While other forks of Gitea focus on philosophical issues, our approach is more direct: Worktree is a fork of Gitea where we’re not afraid to rip-and-tear what we need to in order to make a better product. Additionally, we are vocal in our support for business, not just individuals and open-source, and want to provide a product and platform that everyone from an open-source project to an enterprise-scale business can trust.

Hosting my data inside Canadian borders has been an ongoing project and passion of mine for years now, and it’s time to share that passion, and hopefully find like-minded people who have been looking for the same thing.

So, if you’re starting to feel fed up with GitHub, Microsoft, or the US’ grip on your data… Maybe give Worktree a shot, migrate a few repos over, and let us know how it goes. Or if you’re a business and want something more custom, reach out and let’s talk.

It’s time to take back your data and escape the Big American Tech monopoly.

De Montréal avec l’amour,

Alex Blackie