Source code repositories are one of the most underestimated procurement dependencies in modern engineering. The code itself is intellectual property, the issue tracker contains incident and customer data, and the CI/CD pipeline often holds production secrets and deployment credentials. All of this typically lives with a single vendor.
The dominance of GitHub, owned by Microsoft, has concentrated this dependency at one US provider. For European organizations with sovereignty requirements, regulated industries, or simply a preference for keeping core infrastructure inside the EU, that concentration has become a real procurement issue.
European alternatives have matured significantly. Codeberg, operated by a German non-profit, runs a community Forgejo instance with EU-only hosting and no US dependencies. GitLab’s EU regional product, when paired with self-managed deployments, offers a more sovereign route. Forgejo and Gitea can be self-hosted on any EU infrastructure, providing the lowest-vendor-risk deployment option.
CI/CD has also become more diverse. Self-hosted runners on EU infrastructure, paired with open-source CI tools, can replace SaaS pipeline products entirely for teams willing to operate the underlying platform.