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Gitea launches cloud service to provide a secure alternative to GitHub and GitLab (about.gitea.com)

submitted 11 months ago by Zerush@lemmy.ml to c/opensource@lemmy.ml

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[-] bizdelnick@lemmy.ml 11 points 11 months ago

What is wrong with gitea? Is not forgejo just a slightly modified fork that is regularly synchronized with gitea codebase? I know nothing about motivation of forgejo authors, where can I read about it?

[-] neshura@bookwormstory.social 45 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I'll try to summarize:

Gitea is managed by a For-Profit that apparently popped out of nowhere -> profit motive conflicts directly with FOSS and since the corp isn't well known it must be assumed acquisition was solely to make money
Gitea now requires Copyright attribution, meaning if you push code to Gitea in an existing file it ain't your code anymore -> omega level oof for a FOSS project because this essentially kills any upstream contributing (as seen by Forgejo deciding to stop their contributions)
This Cloud Service being offered when Self-Hosting Gitea is really easy, again -> profit motive conflicts with FOSS but now on steroids because a "core" feature of their service will limit their ability to make more money

[-] Gooey0210@sh.itjust.works 20 points 11 months ago

Thanks for explaining it, because it's a long and complex story I didn't want to type 😅

Also, probably the most touching point is how this happened. Gitea was a community project, and they were electing a leader every year or so, and giving them all the passwords (and it seems like the rights for the project, although it's not stated anywhere) This "out-of-nowhere" company is just one the temporary presidents that hijacked all the domains, repos, etc. Registered a for-profit company and transfered everything there

The community itself wrote an open letter wanting explanations And at the end they forked gitea into forgejo

[-] poVoq@slrpnk.net 6 points 11 months ago

That's a very selective truth way of telling the story. While what you wrote is technically correct, the "temporary president" in question is one of the founders and has been reelected for the position every time. He also did it together with some other core contributors, so while I agree that this was communicated incredibly poorly with the wider community, this wasn't a hostile takeover at all.

[-] Thann@lemmy.ml 6 points 11 months ago

I consider it a hostile takeover because the majority of the community was betrayed by their actions, and they switched from a democratic to a fascist governance model

[-] Dirk@lemmy.ml 4 points 11 months ago

It was absolutely a hostile takeover. And now the copyright thing. It's obvious what they want to do with the former community project.

Fortunately the awesome Forgejo fork exists.

[-] poVoq@slrpnk.net 1 points 11 months ago

I think you first need to define "community". The majority of the code contributors seems to have been actually fine with this change and continue to contribute to Gitea. Only a minority moved to Forgejo.

Personally, I also prefer Forgejo because I share their concerns about the future of Gitea owned by a for profit entity, but let's not invent a false history here.

[-] lemmyvore@feddit.nl 3 points 11 months ago

I've seen my fair share of projects where one of the main contributors/founders took the project commercial. It's never smooth. There will always be a part of the community that feels that open source principles are being bent or trampled.

[-] Gooey0210@sh.itjust.works 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

This a good point, the story i'm telling came from the open letter, and at that point only one guy was considered responsible, and a lot of people signed the letter

But I really consider it a serious takeover, there was a democracy, and then some of the people used their power to turn it into authoritarianism

edit: anyway, I really appreciate your point of view, and just wish everything in the world would be foss and nonprofit and hugs and kisses 😔