Great question. Let me copy/paste explanation of one of the founders:
Collaboration platforms like SourceForge, GitHub, and GitLab enabled and facilitated the development and organization of free software projects.
But as developers of free software we fell into a trap – we poured invaluable source code, documentation and last not least a huge and steady stream of data about our personalities, interests and social networks into proprietary platforms.
These platforms are no charities, they operate to fulfill the commercial objectives of their founders and owners, outside of our control. They are valued and sold for billions of dollars.
Codeberg is trying to fix that. The nonprofit Codeberg e.V. has been founded as independent non-government organization to launch and build a free home for Free and Open Source Software.
Thumbs up for mentioning this, and thanks for your effort. I've always found it odd (to say the least) that F/OSS projects are happily giving away their dev's and user's eyeballs and clicks to commercial entities when many F/OSS projects advertise altruistic or other ethical motives and licenses. Using github.com (or any other project hosting service) for your project's home page also ruins the web and puts all the power in the hand of very few when regular DNS and web hosting has regulated rules where providers and registrars can be negotiated with, switched, appealed, etc. Not to mention that github.com blocks indie search crawlers, adding to the search monopoly we have.
