Harness launches Gitness, an open-source GitHub competitor

They should host a demo instance like Gitea does.

How does this compare to e.g. Forgejo, Gitea, Gogs, self-hosted GitLab, or other alternatives?

Forgejo in particular has self-hosted actions runners that can be registered offline, and the runners themselves can be given labels and execute most existing GitHub actions (in fact, the yaml format they use is intentionally meant to be compatible with GitHub actions).

While the Pipelines UI looks nice, it hides all the very real details of deployment (and configuration) in a variety of environments. This is one thing Forgejo does well compared to e.g. Gitea for CI/CD, thanks to being very flexible in configuring runner secrets, registering runners, and so on. The runners themselves are also designed to run with rootless docker-in-docker. There is also the security aspect to consider. e.g. how does Pipelines prevent secrets from spilling in logs or people running bitcoin miners in CI? Does it offer a better level of security than Forgejo/Gitea here?

The reason I am emphasizing CI/CD is because hosting code and a bug tracker is only one small aspect of GitHub IMO. The real big things are its popularity and GitHub Actions. It's not enough for many people (and businesses) to simply host code anymore. Many now expect commits pushed to certain branches to execute a variety of workflows -- from unit tests to full-on Kubernetes deployments.

looks more complicated than forgeo/gitea . gitea already servers all github needs for us

Gitness, an open-source GitHub competitor which hosts their open-source code...on GitHub... with a prominent call to arms on their landing page to star their repository...on GitHub...

If you don't even use your own product why should anyone else use it?

Perhaps it’s a mirror just to try to draw people in? If you wanted to start a new social network you would market the hell out of it on Facebook so