A Message from Lunny on Gitea Ltd. and the Gitea Project

> As it continued to grow, I additionally trademarked the name “Gitea” in order to protect the project’s brand. (More on the trademark later.)

...

> I have also transferred both the domains and trademarked name to Gitea Ltd. so that they are no longer personally owned by me and will remain indefinitely with the Gitea project.

(no further mention of trademarks)

So, I think the take away here is as a response to the core demands of the 'open letter' being:

- A non-profit organisation owned by the Gitea community is created.

- The Gitea trademark and domains are transferred to the non-profit.

- The name of the company is changed to avoid any confusion with the non-profit.

The answer is bluntly; no.

With regard to the concerns raised about use use of a DAO, the response is (as previously):

> One of the options we have been considering includes a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). ... The DAO management model would also not mean the creation of a gitcoin or crypto token.

So, basically no acknowledgement that using a DAO is fundamentally indistinguishable from using crypto.

A pretty ho-hum response, in my personal opinion.

Well, it is what it is.

I recently learned what a DAO is and I simply don't understand what purpose a "decentralized autonomous organization" could serve here. What am I missing? Python, FreeBSD, Debian etc etc have foundations/boards, hold elections and make decisions without anything so complex.

"Gitea Ltd. will be open to building special versions for special clients and will contribute any features back to the main repository when possible" pretty much means that they won't contribute back everything. That's what you get when contributing to MIT licensed code.

Why use the term DAO when it is essentially everyone has a vote ? I would think a COOp would be a better choice of words. Using a DAO would give negative connotations when you aren’t issuing a token .

> The answer is bluntly; no.

I share the same conclusion. It is time to fork.

Context, last few days here:

Open Letter to Gitea:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33372471

Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33339421

> I created Gitea

No mention of Gogs anywhere, really classy.

(Gitea is a fork of Gogs)

Or their previous system based on voting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33373254

Which is STILL in the repo's README: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#...

Probably not the wisest time to mention the concept of forking.

I interpret that as "I created the Gitea project" not I have written Gitea from scratch.

> Gitea was created by Lunny Xiao, who was also a founder of the self-hosted Git service Gogs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitea

It seems like they're being deliberately obtuse regarding the DAO.

If it really is decoupled from anything financial, then how do they decide who gets what voting weight? Presumably, by manually assigning weights to people (instead of it being weighted based on the size of their financial stake). If some central authority decides the voting weights, how is it still a DAO? (I think that would actually be a reasonable system, since it negates the need for any crypto bullshit, but it seems silly/misleading to call it a DAO at that point)

I can't really decipher their true motives here, but either it will be a financial instrument, or it will only provide the illusion of decentralised decision-making.

I like to think of a DAO as an organisation that is unkillable because there is no central control.

A centrally managed one sounds like a cooperative with more open policy.

>Throughout the life of the project, I have always personally owned both domains. As it continued to grow, I additionally trademarked the name “Gitea” in order to protect the project’s brand. (More on the trademark later.)

The issue as I read it is that he communicated to the community that he isn't the BDFL (benevolent dictator for life) of the project but rather that there is democratic ownership.

>https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#...

Clearly that's not the case. Communities can be mostly fine with a BDFL system if it's made clear however they tend to be less fine with feeling like they've been lied to.

I will work with signatories of the Gitea Open Letter to start a fork and update the progress daily at https://gitea-open-letter.coding.social/updates/

I hope you & the rest of the community will consider writing a detailed postmortem. I take from some of your comments that there has been a series of issues which has culminated in this schism. As someone who has (currently stealth mode) open source projects they'd like to release with a similar model, with a commercial entity supporting a broader community project, I'd appreciate understanding what I should take from this in structuring my project. I don't think I'm alone in that.

Or maybe just cool down a little and give them the chance to clarify things? From reading the discord, this really doesn’t sound like a hostile takeover but well intentions with bad wording.

Reading between the lines, I don’t see anything in this message that implies this is a hostile takeover. It seems like Lunny envisions the Gitea Ltd as an additional assets of the Gitea community. That is, there’s no mention of what is happening to the voting system. It’s possible the current democratic voting system will remain in place, and that if Lunny is voted out, he will voluntary transfer ownership of the LTD to the new owner. The comments are acting like that is not the case but I don’t see anything indicating that.

The communication around this issue is very poor. I’m choosing to apply Occam’s Razor here and assume that Lunny doesn’t understand how other open source projects are run or what the differences between a non-profit and an LTD are (or what a DOA is). Rather than assume that this is an attempt to turn Gitea into a corporate-owned, profit-generating, machine.

It at least 50% doesn't matter if the undesirable actions are the result of honest ignorance. They are still undesirable, and he is now being informed. I don't think there was really any excuse in the first place but definitely now there is none at all, and the non-response validates exactly the open letter's complaints.

Saying "What's the big deal? I don't see the problem." proves the problem. (Lunny I mean)

Something which hasn't been discussed much in this kerfuffle is the role that copyleft can play in protecting projects from this kind of problem. The MIT license is the "default" for many people but it's honestly pretty irresponsible to use it without thinking these cases through.

I represent a similar project (which I shall leave unnamed) and we use copyleft licenses without asking for a copyright assignment from contributors. The result is that the project's copyright is legally held by its contributors and each one licenses their work to everyone else under copyleft terms, requiring everyone involved to commit to keeping it free and open source. Even the project leadership, as it were, is not allowed to take the code and run off with it. Changing the license would involve getting each contributor to agree to a new license, or rewriting the contributions from anyone who does not agree.

As the saying goes: show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome. Design your incentives with care to achieve the desired outcomes. If you make something valuable without considering this, someone will eventually try to take advantage of that value without you.

Push for MIT/BSD licenses can be pretty much shortened to corporations wanting to use some work for free and by proxy developers wanting to make their corporate job easier.

Which would be fine if not that they usually use disgusting rhetoric like trying to argue it's somehow less "free" to have license disallowing taking the freedoms away.

Copyleft has very little to do with this. The authors of a permissively licensed project keep their copyright as well, and nothing stops you from taking over a GPL-licensed project as a company as long as it stays open source. Copyleft only stops someone from distributing changes as closed source.

Where exactly is the kerfuffle here? Is the crux of the issue that the community thought it owned the trademark when in fact it was owned by the initial creator?

Whether contributors fork or not, the code is MIT licensed, anyone can start a consulting organization around a piece of MIT code.

What is Lunny absconding with here?

idk if he bought the domains and trademarks with his own name and also is the creator of Gitea, what’s the open source community is bitching about? It’s time we stop expecting things for free, devs need to get paid

This is people in the open source community trying to decide whether the name "Gitea" is now spoiled for their purposes, and whether to fork the toys into a different sandbox. Nobody is really saying the Gitea people cannot do what they seem to be doing; people are just making their own plans, in reaction.

I'm not that pessimist regarding the announcement, even though it makeup me a little bit suspicious. Still looking forward to the federation/ActivityPub support.

Looks like Gitea will get forked.

I look forward to a new name. Gitea always sounded awful.

Why? It stays open source, not open core, and they will provide consulting and bespoke changes for paying customers.

> we began creating a more formalized operating model so that Gitea could earn funding through public donations, selling Gitea merchandise, and receiving paid commercial contributions.

This sounds in light of recent events like he’s saying “we faked having a community driven operating model despite myself retaining full control, so we could live up to requirements by diners and commercial supporters”.

It seems resonable that he surrender trademark and domain despite him having acquired it personally as it should rightfully belong to the community that the diners and companies sponsored. They where not giving him personally money and they where not giving money under the assumption that it would go towards him starting a company that would take control of everything.

So one can now say gitea, is no longer his cup of tea.

call the fork gitcafe

Gitmate (much stronger) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mate_(drink)

I like it. It keeps the beverage theme while having a more obvious pronunciation and the implication of a place to be social. Nice.

gitcafe is the name of a failed git hosting project in china. but it's been dead since 2016 (http://web.archive.org/web/20160121084706/https://gitcafe.co...) so it[s probably ok to reuse the name now.

That's the beginning of the end, this story is not unique unfortunately

My decision to use gitrc over gitea is looking better and better…

Would it be possible to make something like gitea that's federated on the issues level? I feel like that'd be really useful.

Gitea has been working on federation, slowly but surely.

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