dachary's comments

The previous blog post is more explicit and reads Open Core:

> An enhanced enterprise version

But that's a general problem with these two blog posts. They leave much to interpretation. Except for one thing: Gitea Ltd is in control of the domains & the trademark and won't give them back. The days of a community led project are gone. Just like that.

It will be a pleasure to welcome you in the upcoming fork. Wouldn't you like to participate in a democratic Free Software project instead of working for free and help VC make tons of money?

To be more specific, I raised 50K€ funding in January 2022 for the benefit of two Gitea owners (zeripath and techknowlogick). They did nothing with this funding and blocked any possibility for anyone to use the funds, it just went away. It is a matter of public record here https://discourse.gitea.io/t/nlnet-grant-for-federation-conc...

The work that was done was from unpaid volunteer Gitea contributors.

Given this track record I would be very surprised if the same people are willing to work on federation. It does not make lots of money. It brings freedom to the users. Not profitable and no user-lock in: that's not what the VC will expect of them

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/

> The answer is bluntly; no.

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

There only are three demands:

> 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.

A week ago the Gitea project was an informal community trusting elected individuals with essential assets such as the domains and the trademark. They had a clear moral bound (see https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#...) to pass on the ownership of the project to their successor.

But they thought it was ok to create a company and take the domains and trademark as if they were their property. Maybe the absence of a legal bound made them forget their promise, their moral obligation towards the Gitea community.

Creating a non-profit will avoid that kind of problem in the future and give back the domains and the trademark to the Gitea community. If the president of a non-profit was to transfer the domain name to a for-profit company they exclusively control, the members of the non profit will be in a position to sue the president for embezzlement.

If the for profit company refuses to give back the domains and trademark, that would be very damaging to the project. The post from Harald Welte on that topic in the Gitea forum is enlightening in that regard, see https://discourse.gitea.io/t/open-source-sustainment-and-the...

The other points you cite from the Open Letter are merely suggestions for future improvements (as stated in the letter), not demands.

This is a possibility if diplomacy fails. But diplomacy and dialog should happen first. Going public and publishing this open letter is a sign that other forms of diplomacy did not work (including private messages).

Although people secretly created the company month ago, the first public hint of its existence showed when someone inadvertently mentioned being bound by an NDA. Which raised questions that they could not answer... because they were bound by an NDA.

That was in July 2022.

The Gitea Open Letter has links to the two documents that have the facts you ask for, at the bottom of the page. And with links within the text. They are:

https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#... https://blog.gitea.io/2022/10/open-source-sustainment-and-th...

It may be the case that Lunny forgot he has a moral obligation to the Gitea community that elected him year after year. Even though there is no legally binding contract.

What was done is morally unacceptable. But that can be easily fixed. Just give it all back!

Sometime people make mistakes, big ones. That happens and this open letter gives them the opportunity to make right by the community. A fork is a last resort option, when everything else failed. Patience and understanding is a good thing in Free Software communities. Even when facing what appears to be a malicious action.

Do I think it will persuade Gitea Ltd to give back the domains and the trademark? Honestly, I don't have high hopes. Even if each and every contributor to Gitea signed the letter, I'm unconvinced they will do right by the community.

This open letter had to be published even if it has little chance to be effective. It would be horribly wrong for something like that to happen in a Free Software project without offering a simple and gentle way to do right.

Ultimately it is quite possible the only solution will be a fork. And as the Gogs fork showed, it only takes a handful of motivated developers to succeed.

A few of the top contributors are the one behind the company. It is fair to assume they are perfectly ok with stealing from the community as it directly benefits them...

I'm concerned because domains & trademark, previously under the governance of elected community leaders are now owned by a for-profit corporation based in Hong Kong. This is a takeover.

I work daily on the Gitea codebase as part of my efforts to further forge federation in forgefriends and did not get any advance warning, just as most volunteer contributors.

All you found was essentially me guessing from weak signals with no confirmation. As for my financial interest in Gitea ... I was never involved with the newly formed company. If you mean that I raised over 100,000€ for the benefit of the Gitea project in the past year, this is a different matter. You can read about it at https://discourse.gitea.io/t/nlnet-grant-for-federation-conc...

Gitea was a community led project with democratic elections. The entire community was taken by surprise by the announcement. This is what you would call a "breaking change" in a release :-)

One thing is for certain: Gitea is no longer what it was a few days ago and there is no telling what the next 10 years have in store.

This announcement took the entire Gitea community by surprise, including volunteer developers contributing code daily to the project. Gitea turned from being a community led democratic project to a company that owns the domains and the trademark, overnight.

This is an even bigger problem than going open core and is begging for a fork to happen.

In terms of business model, yes. Now Gitea and GitLab are both https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model

There is however a difference and that matters significantly. GitLab was a company when they made the move to Open Core. It was their decision to make, unilateraly.

Gitea was a community driver project, with elected leaders assumed to care for the need of the community before their own. But they secretly created this company and transferred the domain and trademark to the company. So the community is gone an the volunteer contributors have been taken by surprise. This is not good.

It means there will be a proprietary version of Gitea, named Gitea Enterprise or something similar. The company is based on an Open Core business model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model.

Yes, it is solved in this particular context: Linux kernel, Qemu and all Free Software projects that have a mail based workflow. But there are other contexts where Free Software developers chose a different workflow such as using a forge. Whatever the reasons, this is where we are now. There are two paths forward: a) convince people using forges to switch to a mail based workflow, b) federate forges. I believe SourceHut and many other do a fine job trying to convince people to switch to a mail based workflow. The https://forgefriends.org and https://gitea.io projects chose to try to federate forges. It's not a competition, there is value in both approaches and they will apparently move forward in parallel for the foreseeable future.

Federating software projects so they can be interacted with from any forge frontend is the main focus. But federating the search engines internal to each forge is another important aspect. When federated search becomes a reality, looking for a project B on forge A will give an answer even when it is hosted on forge B.

Nowadays, with over 90% of the search run by Google, it does not matter much. Discoverability is whatever Google decides it is. But this is not desirable and more importantly it should not considered to be a solution to the discoverability problem. On the contrary dominance of Google is the main problem of discoverability and the only way to solve it is to provide sound alternatives.

Note that https://fedeproxy.eu is a kind of reverse proxy to cope with forges that do not want to (or don't have yet the ability to) federate issues.