13 ms·

Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea

157 points by TheBrokenRail 4y ago

rvz 4y ago
Looks like Blender is onboard with moving to Gitea. However: > To preserve the community aspect of Gitea we are experimenting with creating a decentralized autonomous organization where contributors would receive benefits based on their participation such as from code, documentation, translations, and perhaps even assisting individual community members with support questions. So Gitea wants to create a DAO and "receive benefits based on their participation such as from code" assuming it going to be similar to Gitcoin, which may involve using crypto tokens, NFTs and the like. Good for them; either way.
- throwaccount12 4y ago
  I read it as, a way to provide benefits from the company to contributors, but the blog post also mentions other ways of funding the community
simonw 4y ago
Creating a DAO for this sounds _incredibly_ risky to me. One tiny flaw in the design of that organization and the project could be destroyed by people gaming the DAO rules for profit.
- eitland 4y ago
  But does decentralized autonomous organization always have to imply blockchain?
  - remram 4y ago
    I'm hoping they mean something else but I really can't imagine what. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_autonomous_organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_autonomous_organ...
  - andreareina 4y ago
    If they didn't mean blockchain they could have not used a phrase that is very strongly associated with it, and instead used any number of other terms in colloquial use that match the properties of the organization they're setting up.
    - alias_neo 4y ago
      If you look at the sponsors at the bottom of the page linked, the first name is a blockchain company/organisation, which in my mind lends credibility to the fears that they really do mean blockchain and aren't just jumping on the buzz-phrase bandwagon.
  - WorldMaker 4y ago
    We have the words "corporation" or "company" (or "foundation" or "conservancy") for easy to find synonyms of "organization" and despite appearances none of those words directly implies either "centralized" or "decentralized". There are companies and foundations that are built quite decentralized meeting only remotely over the internet today. Companies and corporations are far from "autonomous" however, and that word currently always implies "smart contracts" and blockchain.
- slbtty 4y ago
  There is absolutely nothing that stops anyone from forking the project.
  - IshKebab 4y ago
    There's nothing literally stopping someone click "fork" on GitHub. There are tons of things that make it difficult for people to create a successful forked version that people use and contribute to. Though in this case I guess they could just use Gogs anyway.
- techknowlogick 4y ago
  Hi Simon! First, let me thank you for all that you do with Open Source. I package a few of your Python libraries for NixOS, and they are all so wonderful. I'm the author of the blog post above, and agree with your concerns. That's why we are not committing to creating a DAO, but wanted to to let everyone know it was something that was being looked into to empower the community, and make sure the voice of the community is still very much present. I mention community 4 times in the blog post it is that important to me.
eitland 4y ago
Good luck with it. And if you: - work for a company that uses open source, look for excuses to support it (support contract, etc. I even got good value out of some.) - are an open source project that takes donations: don't get greedy. Two projects I went out of my way to support because they were open source shortly afterwards started "experimenting with models".
- sofixa 4y ago
  > are an open source project that takes donations: don't get greedy. Two projects I went out of my way to support because they were open source shortly afterwards started "experimenting with models". How do you know it's greed and not just insufficient donations forcing them to try to find alternative financing? Just because you donated doesn't mean enough people/businesses did.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    This is usually the main problem, in most cases the donations aren't enough as main line of income.
    - sofixa 4y ago
      Yep. I recall the blog post by InfluxData on monetisation/sustainability and that there's very few options available for an open source software to become self-sustainable, and even fewer working ones. Influx went with the open core route, removing features from the open source version, which kind of killed it. https://www.influxdata.com/blog/update-on-influxdb-clustering-high-availability-and-monetization/ https://www.influxdata.com/blog/update-on-influxdb-clusterin...
    - Aachen 4y ago
      Not enough for what? Paying expenses? Or are you expecting that open source contributions are to be paid at developer rates, and that one should contribute only as much time as is adequately paid? I thought open source meant that everyone was volunteering by default, just writing the features they'd enjoy to have for themselves, and that sponsorship of development time is not the norm aside from hugely important projects (like bigcorps sponsoring kernel development, but also making billions by launching Android that makes extensive use of this kernel) or projects where the sponsor has a commercial interest. Donations are typically for raising money for things like hosting the website and download bandwidth fees.
remram 4y ago
I've been donating to Gitea for years (on their Open Collective [1]) but if they start with this cryptocurrency/blockchain stuff, I am out. I am trying to fund development, not invest unstable currency technology. Gitea itself started as a fork of Gogs, it wouldn't be too surprising to see it fork again if they start being creative with the brand. [1]: https://opencollective.com/gitea https://opencollective.com/gitea
- slbtty 4y ago
  They don't even mention a single thing about crypto?
  - remram 4y ago
    They mention "a decentralized autonomous organization" which is a blockchain invention (a "smart contract" thingie): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_autonomous_organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_autonomous_organ...
    - leppr 4y ago
      The term DAO as it's used now is orthogonal to blockchain and crypto. It's mostly a term to describe codified governance/community systems. There may be point systems implemented via crypto tokens, but in the vast majority of cases those would be better implemented on centralized ledgers since there's someone with centralized control over either the token issuance, the communication channels, or other essential resources. If they were developed now, Stack Overflow and Wikipedia would be considered DAOs.
      - stonogo 4y ago
        That would just indicate the term 'DAO' doesn't mean anything at all. I'm unable to find an actual example of anything calling itself a DAO which doesn't also play with cryptocurrency tokens, so I'm pretty sure the term isn't used outside of that fanbase.
      - 4y ago
kyriakos 4y ago
Going the way of gitlab?
- dachary 4y ago
  In terms of business model, yes. Now Gitea and GitLab are both https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model 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.
guywhocodes 4y ago
Lost me at: > An enhanced enterprise version Good thing it's towards the end, guess it's time for the next fork of gogs then.
- bruce511 4y ago
  I'm going to assume you are not an enterprise - forgive me if I'm wrong. Enterprises have very different needs to individual developers and small shops. So there are always features which apply to enterprises but not to small companies. Consider for example Active Directory integration. Equally purchasing in an enterprise is different to small companies. If you work for a small company you can basically go to a decision maker, make a case, and if accepted then money glows within the day. Enterprise businesses don't work like that. They basically can't just "donate money". There are a million layers to work through, and there have to be tangible reasons for spending the money - it can't be things like "good karma" etc. So for OSS projects that are used by (especially non-tech) enterprise customers, it makes sense to be an entity, and sell a product, that enterprises can buy. The inhibiter for an enterprise is not a lack of money on their side, its a lack of process on the OSS side which matches up to the process they have to fulfill.
  - alias_neo 4y ago
    The issue, in my mind, if I was making a similar comment, is that projects seem draw the line in the wrong place for where "Enterprise" begins. I suspect this person's fears may be similar. The issue isn't that they'll offer enterprise, the issue is that they'll carve up the non-enterprise version as a differentiator. Inevitably, and I've seen this before, the non-enterprise version loses all steam because time and effort have to be focused on the enterprise customers, and feature parity can't be maintained because those differentiators have to show value in the enterprise offering. Those OSS users who built the community and contributed to your product for years end up having been beta testers, unceremoniously ushered out to find an alternative. Elastic for example made the mistake of making "secure" (by default) an "Enterprise" feature of Elastic Stack, then Amazon came along and ate their lunch. For me, I've seen this enough not to worry; if they go "south" in this respect, there are alternatives; and failing that, there's the minimalist approach of plain git.
phinnaeus 4y ago
If the author of this blogpost is reading this and wondering why the link in the post didn't render properly: > (their move to using Gitea)[https://code.blender.org/2022/07/gitea-diaries-part-1/ https://code.blender.org/2022/07/gitea-diaries-part-1/] it's because you switched up which braces go where for a markdown link. should be [text](link)
- girvo 4y ago
  I constantly make that mistake. I don't know why, I simply can't seem to get the muscle memory right for some reason, and I always do ()[] first.
  - lbotos 4y ago
    I always remember it as alphabetical order, brackets then parens, b then p.
    - kretaceous 4y ago
      I remember it as calling a function. :) nameOfLink(url)
  - chrismorgan 4y ago
    Well, [text](href) is just a lousy syntax. Quite apart from how easy it is to forget which way round it is, the way round that it is is syntactically problematic: the parentheses are URL code points <https://url.spec.whatwg.org/#url-code-points https://url.spec.whatwg.org/#url-code-points>, so URL encoding won’t percent-encode parentheses, so Markdown doesn’t actually support all valid URLs, leading to injection attacks if all you do is regular URL encoding, deliberate or accidental, and deciding where an href ends is troublesome and inconsistent, with some Markdown implementations terminating at any right parenthesis, and others trying to match parentheses as a heuristic that helps most cases. The other way round, with the href in square brackets, would have been better in this regard, as square brackets aren’t URL code points, and thus will be percent-encoded. But better still would have been to lean on angle brackets more, matching long-held custom and the other style of links Markdown already uses (just plain <href>). In my own lightweight markup language that I’ve been working on for a while and am now polishing up and implementing properly, I’m currently using [text <href>]. [text]<href> is also quite tempting, with slightly different trade-offs. (When I speak of the details of URL encoding and which characters get percent-encoded, these things weren’t quite so clearly-defined back in 2004 as they are now, but I believe it was all still true.)
Shared404 4y ago
I am happy that my git host of choice has a very simple monetization/sustainability model: I pay money, they host my code. Thanks ddevault and anyone else from Sourcehut who may see this!
- throwaccount12 4y ago
  I mean, that's part of the model mentioned in the post above (Instance Hosting/SaaS).
  - Shared404 4y ago
    The thing is, I'm very happy with that not being part of the model, but the whole model. I don't want to deal with experimentation or complex organizations or "an enhanced enterprise version" or free tiers. I want someone to take money from myself and other customers, and use it to make a good product without shenanigans. E: As far as I know, it is still possible to get free accounts on sr.ht - however, it is very transparent that this is not a permanent offer.
- trevyn 4y ago
  Bus factor: 1?
  - ddevault 4y ago
    SourceHut's bus factor is something like 3.6
    - karussell 4y ago
      fyi: I was just checking out SourceHut ... something is wrong with this link https://sr.ht/projects https://sr.ht/projects (get a "bad gateway") (referenced from the main page)
      - ddevault 4y ago
        We're in the midst of a planned maintenance window: https://status.sr.ht/issues/2022-10-24-planned-outage/ https://status.sr.ht/issues/2022-10-24-planned-outage/
LanternLight83 4y ago
The implication of a DAO and Crypto involvement has stirred attention in the comments. I have 2¢ on the matter. First, I don't think we've seen many examples like this in open-source communities. For that reason alone, regardless of the idea's merit, I welcome it; if it is to fail, let us see it, that we may have a case study in the future. Worst case, there is wide support for a fork, and I don't see that becoming any more unreasonable over the next decade. Secondly, just as a brain-storming idea, what if we had like the blockchain and stuff but the rewards weren't pure value (ie. contextual value, one man's treasure; titles, hats, cosmetics, merch vs purchasing power and/or influence)?
- throwaccount12 4y ago
  I hold zero crypto, but by reading of the DAO is that it is one of the ways mentioned of trying to benefit the community or perhaps it will be used for community governance (elsewhere in the post it mentions hiring maintainers, and also creating bounties to fund development), not a way of creating some crypto coin to sell.
  - barnabee 4y ago
    Even if it was a way to sell crypto coins and fund development (presumably while also giving backers some visibility and say on the project’s governance), how is that worse than making part of the project closed source and paid for?
throwaccount12 4y ago
Lots of focus on the DAO mention in the post, but it looking at the concrete things in the blog post instead of some "experiment", there are direct funding models of selling hosting, support services, training and more. The DAO is likely just a way to make the governance of the community more transparent, but I think people are confusing it with creating a crypto coin.
- barnabee 4y ago
  I’d rather see funding come from a crypto token that keeps the software completely open source than enterprise sales, aid hosted versions, and going “open core”. I don’t understand how anyone believes that the current trend of so called “open source” startups is good for free software or anyone other than investors. Given that, I’m very up for experimentation with new types of organisational and finding models for open projects, including ones that use cryptocurrencies and smart contracts.
  - techknowlogick 4y ago
    Hi Barnabee. I'm the author of the blog post. Thanks for your comments. I'd be interested to know why you would prefer funding come from an external crypto token instead of a paying for a hosted version. I would think that dogfooding is a way to stay on focus on the main project instead of being distracted by something else.
hpaavola 4y ago
The development of Robot Framework(1) was originally paid by Nokia, but then things happened and Nokia decided not to continue doing that anymore. The main developer of Robot Framework and few companies using RF heavily understood that something had to be done, so Robot Framework Foundation(2) was formed. RF Foundation has membership fees, it arranges RF conferences etc. which allows RF Foundation to pay for the development of RF. I think that is a really good way to fund OSS development. Those companies which benefit the most from it, pay membership fees and gets to vote on the direction of the product. (1) https://robotframework.org/ https://robotframework.org/ (2) https://robotframework.org/foundation/ https://robotframework.org/foundation/
- rapnie 4y ago
  This is comparable to how Codeberg [0] is organized, which is also based on Gitea and one of the larger contributors upstream. Yet the number of members is tiny in comparison to their person base and growth. According to their latest numbers [1]: > We are hosting 42010 repositories, created and maintained by 34042 users. Compared to one month ago, this is an organic growth rate of +3372 repositories (+8.7% month-over-month) and +2271 users (+7.1%). And further on: > Codeberg e.V. has 246 members in total, these are 175 members with active voting rights and 69 supporting members, and 2 honorary members. [0] https://codeberg.org https://codeberg.org [1] https://blog.codeberg.org/letter-from-codeberg-hackathon-translation-service-more.html https://blog.codeberg.org/letter-from-codeberg-hackathon-tra...
  - trevyn 4y ago
    To be fair, they don't exactly make it low-friction to become a member: > Membership fees are debited by means of SEPA direct debit. Please email to contact@codeberg.org for other transfer methods.
    - Semaphor 4y ago
      FWIW, in Germany, that is an extremely convenient way of paying.
maxloh 4y ago
They need to put more effort on UI design. Gitea is a lot uglier than its alternative.
- wildcow 4y ago
  I think PRs are open :)
- jraph 4y ago
  I'm surprised. I find Gitea pretty. More than GitLab. Looks similar to GitHub to me.
  - rapnie 4y ago
    Using Codeberg with the dark theme, and I must say that I like it better than Github. Really crisp and easy-to-use UI.
- mcluck 4y ago
  It doesn't look quite as good as Github but it's miles ahead of Gitlab
- prmoustache 4y ago
  This makes no sense. I have never heard anyone say github was ugly and gitea pretty much replicates most of it. It could be more singular/original but people using that kind of tools are looking to get the job done, not to use some fancy website. I'd rather have speed than anything else. It is funny that on the same community people can blame an open source tool such as gimp for not being a straight copy of photoshop, then are not happy when another open source project is staight copu of a proprietary one.
- throwaccount12 4y ago
  Maybe this new company can pay for a designer
hrbf 4y ago
Gitea is a great piece of software. In fact, when starting out with self hosting, I found it to be a very capable solution with a small footprint. Over time I realized: I don’t need to be able to merge pull requests and do code reviews in a web interface. Nowadays I’m invested in a plain Git/SSH setup with cgit as a web frontend and email patches. It never breaks, is as secure as your server is and does everything you usually need, including user permissions. The `git am`-based workflow is less than popular outside of FreeBSD, Linux kernel development and SourceHut though. Depending on your environment, if used in a work setting, your colleagues may balk. That being said and given the existing enterprise users of Gitea, it’s entirely natural to eventually offer solutions tailored to their use, like SSO. I wish them the best for building towards a sustainable future while staying true to their core values.
- e3bc54b2 4y ago
  I agree. I can't even remember why I was so scared of trying out email + path workflow, but after trying it for just 1 time I was convinced. It is so obviously good way to manage patches, you get a unified interface to bugs, patches, communication and everything in-between. I can understand some folks not wanting to do initial setup and sourcehut already provides a nice web interface for it. But for actually contributing stuff emails are pretty unbeatable IMO.
- Dave3of5 4y ago
  How do you setup a plain git server is there a step by step anywhere I could follow ?
  - hrbf 4y ago
    Funny you should ask. I had actually written this up back then – for a FreeBSD install because it’s what I use. https://herrbischoff.com/2021/10/how-to-install-cgit-with-gitolite-and-nginx-on-freebsd-13/ https://herrbischoff.com/2021/10/how-to-install-cgit-with-gi... I’ve also tripped over something regarding “master” and “main” branches that’s easily fixed: https://herrbischoff.com/2022/05/cgit-missing-idle-column-on-some-repositories/ https://herrbischoff.com/2022/05/cgit-missing-idle-column-on... If you want it even simpler, just run mkdir repo.git && cd repo.git git init —bare in a folder on a server you have SSH access to and clone it on your local machine like git clone user@server:/path/to/repo.git
drej 4y ago
For me the main deterrent from Gitea has been their approach to UI design. The shameless inspiration (if you can call it that) they took from Github is pretty startling, the two interfaces look pretty much identical (well, Github has recently redesigned its repo page, but many can remember the old design). Sure, get inspired, make something similar here or there, but this is an outright copy of the whole product design.
- tpxl 4y ago
  I just compared Gitea and Gitlab side-by-side and they're very, very similar. So either there's also copying between GitHub and Gitlab, or the design of git lends itself to a very specific interface.
  - KronisLV 4y ago
    > So either there's also copying between GitHub and Gitlab Isn't it likely that there's just a certain kind of interface and functionality that both works and people have also gotten used to it over time? It might make a lot of sense to copy it to at least some degree, instead of reinventing the wheel: if you look at MS Office and something like LibreOffice, you'll notice that both of the spreadsheet apps are rather similar (and you can even enable a ribbon interface in LibreOffice, if you want). I think the same more or less applies to every piece of software, from how phone OSes look, to how desktop environments look and work, as well as why the majority of websites out there look a bit samey.
    - tpxl 4y ago
      > Isn't it likely that there's just a certain kind of interface and functionality that both works and people have also gotten used to it over time? This is what I meant by 'design of git lends itself to a very specific interface'. Git has branches, commits, merging, rebasing, ... It makes sense for a UI interface over git to show data git itself shows. I also find little wrong with copying UI elements, where it works. The result is better software all around.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
roastedpeacock 4y ago
What jurisdiction will the organisation be registered in and in the unlikely event of a dispute how will that impact the project?
- rapnie 4y ago
  It is apparently based in Hong Kong.
  - roastedpeacock 4y ago
    Given recent regressions in Hong Kong that may not be the best idea.
olavgg 4y ago
I am a big fan of Gitea, it does exactly what I wants it too and its very easy to maintain over time. I run it together with ZFS and SQLite. This enables atomic snapshot of both the database and git repository. And this is of course replicated to another system. SQLite is plenty fast, people should avoid more complex solutions using PostgreSQL or MySQL. I've also configured SSO with Azure Active Directory which everyone with mail from Microsoft has access for free. For the past few years I've completed a few dozen upgrades, only 2 times it has broken. One was a new configuration property I needed to add, and one was that I upgraded GoLang a bit too early and Gitea didn't support it. Compared to many other open source projects, Gitea is a joy to use and run. And I hope it will stay like this for another 10 years.
- dachary 4y ago
  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.
  - throwaccount12 4y ago
    > The entire community The blog post says maintainers have been hired, as well as the Blender blog post is months old, seems like this has been public knowledge for a while, but that it is just formally being announced now. Edit: seems I am getting downvoted, but I searched dachary who has a financial interest in Gitea, and has posted about the company in the past, so he clearly has known about this for a while. I wonder why he happens to not mention a conflict.
    - jonnytran 4y ago
      I currently work for a company where one of my co-workers is a maintainer of the official Gitea repo. There was no mention of this anywhere prior to the blog post, including in private Discord channels. It has _not_ been public knowledge for a while. What you said is false. I suspect that is why you're getting downvoted.
lvncelot 4y ago
> If you are a company and rely on Gitea, especially for critical operations, please get in touch as we are now able to offer: > [...] > An enhanced enterprise version It's sad to see Gitea not receiving enough donations/funding to stay afloat, and I obviously can't fault them for taking the necessary steps to generate revenue, but it's also sad to see it eventually going open-core. (Which is how I read the announcement)
- dachary 4y ago
  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.
  - MaxBarraclough 4y ago
    Great points. I agree there will be a backlash from contributors. As far as I can tell they don't ask contributors to hand over copyrights, but they use the permissive MIT-style licence which permits the creation of non-Free forks. Drew DeVault, of SourceHut fame, has written on this topic. [0][1] Drew's opinion is that he probably couldn't easily turn SourceHut to the 'open core' model even if he wanted to, on account of its use of AGPL-licensed code from contributors (who retain the copyrights). [0] https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-10-09-ip-assignment-or-lack-thereof/ https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-10-09-ip-assignment-or-lack-... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31963559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31963559
    - throwaccount12 4y ago
      AGPL has a bad reputation because it has been weaponized against the community from companies like Elastic.
      - MaxBarraclough 4y ago
goodpoint 4y ago
> there are a few corporations (with revenues that are greater than some countries GDP) are building on Gitea for core products without even contributing back enhancements That's exactly what you get when you release Gitea under MIT. What they are looking for is AGPL.
- Aachen 4y ago
  Yeah I was fully expecting a licence change with that preamble. And then they mention DAO ._. GPL scares people for stupid reasons (stupid from my fanatical perspective that if you use open source software, of course your derivatives ought to be open as well), Gitea honestly might be so popular because it had a more free license than GPL. Doesn't mean I'm sad to see they're not even trying to make these changes be contributed back going forward.
  - goodpoint 4y ago
    > Gitea honestly might be so popular because it had a more free license than GPL Citation needed.
    - Aachen 4y ago
      Citation for a hunch is pretty hard to give
    - rapnie 4y ago
      > more free That is in the eye of the beholder. Phrasing as 'more permissive' is more accurate.
      - Aachen 4y ago
        To me those are synonyms, but I'm not a native speaker. When you're allowed to do more things, such as taking open source code and using it without ever contributing anything back even if you distribute compiled versions of these people's work for exorbitant fees, aren't you more "free" to do what you want than if this were restricted in any way? I'm not saying I morally agree with it, but that's what I understand the word to mean.
fractalf 4y ago
Why not just use shaming to get big companies to contribute? Name them, keep a list, put them on display. I mean, they should be ashamed to use a free open source and not contributing in any way.
- tsegers 4y ago
  Using software in accordance with the terms of its licence is not shameful.
sebazzz 4y ago
> An enhanced enterprise version But still open source?
sangnoir 4y ago
Oh, fuck - I had a good run I guess: I love Gitea, but this seems like a change for the worse. I think there's an open source trap where successful projects see their adoption numbers, and billion-dollar companies using their projects and think "We're leaving money on the table" (which IMO is the whole point of libre software). Unfortunately, this is the path to weird software licenses, open-core / community-edition product splits and a whole host that makes the software less useful to me as an individual user and occasional contributor. Besides, Gitea won't be able to make much out of individuals like me, so their roadmap will likely favor paying customers. I can guarantee that it will be too bloated to run on a Raspberry Pi Zero like I have it today, which means I'd have to choose something else. I also suspect that switching to a for-profit company will decrease the number of volunteer contributions, after all following the same big idea that led to incorporation: who wants to work for free when someone else is making the money? The good news about F/OSS is I have started my countdown to a community fork. After all, Gitea itself is a fork -it is the circle of life. Edit: I forgot they are trying to pay contributors with some web3 scheme, perhaps to try and solve the inherent hypocrisy. But the cure may be worse than the disease because it further complicates the process of contributing to the project and reduces maintainer focus on actual product. Just give me pull-requests.
- throwaccount12 4y ago
  The DAO was mentioned only around transparent governance and giving back to the community, but the blog post mentions hiring maintainers presumably with cash.
  - sangnoir 4y ago
    You seem extremely vested[1] in this, and have been very active in this thread - are you affiliated with the freshly-registered company? If so, I'd encourage you not to hide behind a throwaway because it gives the impression that you don't want to stand by your words. More on topic: does this mean occasional/casual contributors to the project will continue to work for free while maintainers & employees get paid? 1. You looked up the name of one commenter and the donations made in their name 3 years ago.
techknowlogick 4y ago
Hi everyone. I'm the author of the blog post above, and I am sorry that I caused so much confusion. I have spent much of today trying to clear things up, and will be writing a follow up to the post. I see some concern around the mention of a DAO, I tried to get across in the blog post that community is incredibly important, and so I mentioned it as a possible way to ensure community governance, not to create a cryptocurrency and sell that. I mentioned it to be entirely transparent that it was a way that we are possibly investigating to make sure community is still involved. Thanks to our paying clients, the company has been able to hire some maintainers, and contribute back the changes we've made back to the project so everyone can benefit. We are also looking into establishing a fund to not only pay contributors, but also projects we rely on.
- sneak 4y ago
  What does “enhanced enterprise version” mean? Proprietary software?
- _pfxa 4y ago
  You say in the blog post itself > To preserve the community aspect of Gitea we are experimenting with creating a decentralized autonomous organization where contributors would receive benefits based on their participation such as from code, documentation, translations, and perhaps even assisting individual community members with support questions. This is a DAO where you earn scrip through a gamified version of FOSS development. This has nothing to do with "community" (which is a word I'm pretty sick of hearing coming from the mouths of software devs and tech companies).
- dachary 4y ago
  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.

157 points by TheBrokenRail 4y ago

rvz 4y ago

Looks like Blender is onboard with moving to Gitea. However: > To preserve the community aspect of Gitea we are experimenting with creating a decentralized autonomous organization where contributors would receive benefits based on their participation such as from code, documentation, translations, and perhaps even assisting individual community members with support questions. So Gitea wants to create a DAO and "receive benefits based on their participation such as from code" assuming it going to be similar to Gitcoin, which may involve using crypto tokens, NFTs and the like. Good for them; either way.

throwaccount12 4y ago
I read it as, a way to provide benefits from the company to contributors, but the blog post also mentions other ways of funding the community

simonw 4y ago

Creating a DAO for this sounds _incredibly_ risky to me. One tiny flaw in the design of that organization and the project could be destroyed by people gaming the DAO rules for profit.

eitland 4y ago
But does decentralized autonomous organization always have to imply blockchain?
- remram 4y ago
  I'm hoping they mean something else but I really can't imagine what. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_autonomous_organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_autonomous_organ...
- andreareina 4y ago
  If they didn't mean blockchain they could have not used a phrase that is very strongly associated with it, and instead used any number of other terms in colloquial use that match the properties of the organization they're setting up.
  - alias_neo 4y ago
    If you look at the sponsors at the bottom of the page linked, the first name is a blockchain company/organisation, which in my mind lends credibility to the fears that they really do mean blockchain and aren't just jumping on the buzz-phrase bandwagon.
- WorldMaker 4y ago
  We have the words "corporation" or "company" (or "foundation" or "conservancy") for easy to find synonyms of "organization" and despite appearances none of those words directly implies either "centralized" or "decentralized". There are companies and foundations that are built quite decentralized meeting only remotely over the internet today. Companies and corporations are far from "autonomous" however, and that word currently always implies "smart contracts" and blockchain.
slbtty 4y ago
There is absolutely nothing that stops anyone from forking the project.
- IshKebab 4y ago
  There's nothing literally stopping someone click "fork" on GitHub. There are tons of things that make it difficult for people to create a successful forked version that people use and contribute to. Though in this case I guess they could just use Gogs anyway.
techknowlogick 4y ago
Hi Simon! First, let me thank you for all that you do with Open Source. I package a few of your Python libraries for NixOS, and they are all so wonderful. I'm the author of the blog post above, and agree with your concerns. That's why we are not committing to creating a DAO, but wanted to to let everyone know it was something that was being looked into to empower the community, and make sure the voice of the community is still very much present. I mention community 4 times in the blog post it is that important to me.

eitland 4y ago

Good luck with it. And if you: - work for a company that uses open source, look for excuses to support it (support contract, etc. I even got good value out of some.) - are an open source project that takes donations: don't get greedy. Two projects I went out of my way to support because they were open source shortly afterwards started "experimenting with models".

sofixa 4y ago
> are an open source project that takes donations: don't get greedy. Two projects I went out of my way to support because they were open source shortly afterwards started "experimenting with models". How do you know it's greed and not just insufficient donations forcing them to try to find alternative financing? Just because you donated doesn't mean enough people/businesses did.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  This is usually the main problem, in most cases the donations aren't enough as main line of income.
  - sofixa 4y ago
    Yep. I recall the blog post by InfluxData on monetisation/sustainability and that there's very few options available for an open source software to become self-sustainable, and even fewer working ones. Influx went with the open core route, removing features from the open source version, which kind of killed it. https://www.influxdata.com/blog/update-on-influxdb-clustering-high-availability-and-monetization/ https://www.influxdata.com/blog/update-on-influxdb-clusterin...
  - Aachen 4y ago
    Not enough for what? Paying expenses? Or are you expecting that open source contributions are to be paid at developer rates, and that one should contribute only as much time as is adequately paid? I thought open source meant that everyone was volunteering by default, just writing the features they'd enjoy to have for themselves, and that sponsorship of development time is not the norm aside from hugely important projects (like bigcorps sponsoring kernel development, but also making billions by launching Android that makes extensive use of this kernel) or projects where the sponsor has a commercial interest. Donations are typically for raising money for things like hosting the website and download bandwidth fees.

remram 4y ago

I've been donating to Gitea for years (on their Open Collective [1]) but if they start with this cryptocurrency/blockchain stuff, I am out. I am trying to fund development, not invest unstable currency technology. Gitea itself started as a fork of Gogs, it wouldn't be too surprising to see it fork again if they start being creative with the brand. [1]: https://opencollective.com/gitea https://opencollective.com/gitea

slbtty 4y ago
They don't even mention a single thing about crypto?
- remram 4y ago
  They mention "a decentralized autonomous organization" which is a blockchain invention (a "smart contract" thingie): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_autonomous_organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_autonomous_organ...
  - leppr 4y ago
    The term DAO as it's used now is orthogonal to blockchain and crypto. It's mostly a term to describe codified governance/community systems. There may be point systems implemented via crypto tokens, but in the vast majority of cases those would be better implemented on centralized ledgers since there's someone with centralized control over either the token issuance, the communication channels, or other essential resources. If they were developed now, Stack Overflow and Wikipedia would be considered DAOs.
    - stonogo 4y ago
      That would just indicate the term 'DAO' doesn't mean anything at all. I'm unable to find an actual example of anything calling itself a DAO which doesn't also play with cryptocurrency tokens, so I'm pretty sure the term isn't used outside of that fanbase.
    - 4y ago

kyriakos 4y ago

Going the way of gitlab?

dachary 4y ago
In terms of business model, yes. Now Gitea and GitLab are both https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model 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.

guywhocodes 4y ago

Lost me at: > An enhanced enterprise version Good thing it's towards the end, guess it's time for the next fork of gogs then.

bruce511 4y ago
I'm going to assume you are not an enterprise - forgive me if I'm wrong. Enterprises have very different needs to individual developers and small shops. So there are always features which apply to enterprises but not to small companies. Consider for example Active Directory integration. Equally purchasing in an enterprise is different to small companies. If you work for a small company you can basically go to a decision maker, make a case, and if accepted then money glows within the day. Enterprise businesses don't work like that. They basically can't just "donate money". There are a million layers to work through, and there have to be tangible reasons for spending the money - it can't be things like "good karma" etc. So for OSS projects that are used by (especially non-tech) enterprise customers, it makes sense to be an entity, and sell a product, that enterprises can buy. The inhibiter for an enterprise is not a lack of money on their side, its a lack of process on the OSS side which matches up to the process they have to fulfill.
- alias_neo 4y ago
  The issue, in my mind, if I was making a similar comment, is that projects seem draw the line in the wrong place for where "Enterprise" begins. I suspect this person's fears may be similar. The issue isn't that they'll offer enterprise, the issue is that they'll carve up the non-enterprise version as a differentiator. Inevitably, and I've seen this before, the non-enterprise version loses all steam because time and effort have to be focused on the enterprise customers, and feature parity can't be maintained because those differentiators have to show value in the enterprise offering. Those OSS users who built the community and contributed to your product for years end up having been beta testers, unceremoniously ushered out to find an alternative. Elastic for example made the mistake of making "secure" (by default) an "Enterprise" feature of Elastic Stack, then Amazon came along and ate their lunch. For me, I've seen this enough not to worry; if they go "south" in this respect, there are alternatives; and failing that, there's the minimalist approach of plain git.

phinnaeus 4y ago

If the author of this blogpost is reading this and wondering why the link in the post didn't render properly: > (their move to using Gitea)[https://code.blender.org/2022/07/gitea-diaries-part-1/ https://code.blender.org/2022/07/gitea-diaries-part-1/] it's because you switched up which braces go where for a markdown link. should be [text](link)

girvo 4y ago
I constantly make that mistake. I don't know why, I simply can't seem to get the muscle memory right for some reason, and I always do ()[] first.
- lbotos 4y ago
  I always remember it as alphabetical order, brackets then parens, b then p.
  - kretaceous 4y ago
    I remember it as calling a function. :) nameOfLink(url)
- chrismorgan 4y ago
  Well, [text](href) is just a lousy syntax. Quite apart from how easy it is to forget which way round it is, the way round that it is is syntactically problematic: the parentheses are URL code points <https://url.spec.whatwg.org/#url-code-points https://url.spec.whatwg.org/#url-code-points>, so URL encoding won’t percent-encode parentheses, so Markdown doesn’t actually support all valid URLs, leading to injection attacks if all you do is regular URL encoding, deliberate or accidental, and deciding where an href ends is troublesome and inconsistent, with some Markdown implementations terminating at any right parenthesis, and others trying to match parentheses as a heuristic that helps most cases. The other way round, with the href in square brackets, would have been better in this regard, as square brackets aren’t URL code points, and thus will be percent-encoded. But better still would have been to lean on angle brackets more, matching long-held custom and the other style of links Markdown already uses (just plain <href>). In my own lightweight markup language that I’ve been working on for a while and am now polishing up and implementing properly, I’m currently using [text <href>]. [text]<href> is also quite tempting, with slightly different trade-offs. (When I speak of the details of URL encoding and which characters get percent-encoded, these things weren’t quite so clearly-defined back in 2004 as they are now, but I believe it was all still true.)

Shared404 4y ago

I am happy that my git host of choice has a very simple monetization/sustainability model: I pay money, they host my code. Thanks ddevault and anyone else from Sourcehut who may see this!

throwaccount12 4y ago
I mean, that's part of the model mentioned in the post above (Instance Hosting/SaaS).
- Shared404 4y ago
  The thing is, I'm very happy with that not being part of the model, but the whole model. I don't want to deal with experimentation or complex organizations or "an enhanced enterprise version" or free tiers. I want someone to take money from myself and other customers, and use it to make a good product without shenanigans. E: As far as I know, it is still possible to get free accounts on sr.ht - however, it is very transparent that this is not a permanent offer.
trevyn 4y ago
Bus factor: 1?
- ddevault 4y ago
  SourceHut's bus factor is something like 3.6
  - karussell 4y ago
    fyi: I was just checking out SourceHut ... something is wrong with this link https://sr.ht/projects https://sr.ht/projects (get a "bad gateway") (referenced from the main page)
    - ddevault 4y ago
      We're in the midst of a planned maintenance window: https://status.sr.ht/issues/2022-10-24-planned-outage/ https://status.sr.ht/issues/2022-10-24-planned-outage/

LanternLight83 4y ago

The implication of a DAO and Crypto involvement has stirred attention in the comments. I have 2¢ on the matter. First, I don't think we've seen many examples like this in open-source communities. For that reason alone, regardless of the idea's merit, I welcome it; if it is to fail, let us see it, that we may have a case study in the future. Worst case, there is wide support for a fork, and I don't see that becoming any more unreasonable over the next decade. Secondly, just as a brain-storming idea, what if we had like the blockchain and stuff but the rewards weren't pure value (ie. contextual value, one man's treasure; titles, hats, cosmetics, merch vs purchasing power and/or influence)?

throwaccount12 4y ago
I hold zero crypto, but by reading of the DAO is that it is one of the ways mentioned of trying to benefit the community or perhaps it will be used for community governance (elsewhere in the post it mentions hiring maintainers, and also creating bounties to fund development), not a way of creating some crypto coin to sell.
- barnabee 4y ago
  Even if it was a way to sell crypto coins and fund development (presumably while also giving backers some visibility and say on the project’s governance), how is that worse than making part of the project closed source and paid for?

throwaccount12 4y ago

Lots of focus on the DAO mention in the post, but it looking at the concrete things in the blog post instead of some "experiment", there are direct funding models of selling hosting, support services, training and more. The DAO is likely just a way to make the governance of the community more transparent, but I think people are confusing it with creating a crypto coin.

barnabee 4y ago
I’d rather see funding come from a crypto token that keeps the software completely open source than enterprise sales, aid hosted versions, and going “open core”. I don’t understand how anyone believes that the current trend of so called “open source” startups is good for free software or anyone other than investors. Given that, I’m very up for experimentation with new types of organisational and finding models for open projects, including ones that use cryptocurrencies and smart contracts.
- techknowlogick 4y ago
  Hi Barnabee. I'm the author of the blog post. Thanks for your comments. I'd be interested to know why you would prefer funding come from an external crypto token instead of a paying for a hosted version. I would think that dogfooding is a way to stay on focus on the main project instead of being distracted by something else.

hpaavola 4y ago

The development of Robot Framework(1) was originally paid by Nokia, but then things happened and Nokia decided not to continue doing that anymore. The main developer of Robot Framework and few companies using RF heavily understood that something had to be done, so Robot Framework Foundation(2) was formed. RF Foundation has membership fees, it arranges RF conferences etc. which allows RF Foundation to pay for the development of RF. I think that is a really good way to fund OSS development. Those companies which benefit the most from it, pay membership fees and gets to vote on the direction of the product. (1) https://robotframework.org/ https://robotframework.org/ (2) https://robotframework.org/foundation/ https://robotframework.org/foundation/

rapnie 4y ago
This is comparable to how Codeberg [0] is organized, which is also based on Gitea and one of the larger contributors upstream. Yet the number of members is tiny in comparison to their person base and growth. According to their latest numbers [1]: > We are hosting 42010 repositories, created and maintained by 34042 users. Compared to one month ago, this is an organic growth rate of +3372 repositories (+8.7% month-over-month) and +2271 users (+7.1%). And further on: > Codeberg e.V. has 246 members in total, these are 175 members with active voting rights and 69 supporting members, and 2 honorary members. [0] https://codeberg.org https://codeberg.org [1] https://blog.codeberg.org/letter-from-codeberg-hackathon-translation-service-more.html https://blog.codeberg.org/letter-from-codeberg-hackathon-tra...
- trevyn 4y ago
  To be fair, they don't exactly make it low-friction to become a member: > Membership fees are debited by means of SEPA direct debit. Please email to contact@codeberg.org for other transfer methods.
  - Semaphor 4y ago
    FWIW, in Germany, that is an extremely convenient way of paying.

maxloh 4y ago

They need to put more effort on UI design. Gitea is a lot uglier than its alternative.

wildcow 4y ago
I think PRs are open :)
jraph 4y ago
I'm surprised. I find Gitea pretty. More than GitLab. Looks similar to GitHub to me.
- rapnie 4y ago
  Using Codeberg with the dark theme, and I must say that I like it better than Github. Really crisp and easy-to-use UI.
mcluck 4y ago
It doesn't look quite as good as Github but it's miles ahead of Gitlab
prmoustache 4y ago
This makes no sense. I have never heard anyone say github was ugly and gitea pretty much replicates most of it. It could be more singular/original but people using that kind of tools are looking to get the job done, not to use some fancy website. I'd rather have speed than anything else. It is funny that on the same community people can blame an open source tool such as gimp for not being a straight copy of photoshop, then are not happy when another open source project is staight copu of a proprietary one.
throwaccount12 4y ago
Maybe this new company can pay for a designer

hrbf 4y ago

Gitea is a great piece of software. In fact, when starting out with self hosting, I found it to be a very capable solution with a small footprint. Over time I realized: I don’t need to be able to merge pull requests and do code reviews in a web interface. Nowadays I’m invested in a plain Git/SSH setup with cgit as a web frontend and email patches. It never breaks, is as secure as your server is and does everything you usually need, including user permissions. The `git am`-based workflow is less than popular outside of FreeBSD, Linux kernel development and SourceHut though. Depending on your environment, if used in a work setting, your colleagues may balk. That being said and given the existing enterprise users of Gitea, it’s entirely natural to eventually offer solutions tailored to their use, like SSO. I wish them the best for building towards a sustainable future while staying true to their core values.

e3bc54b2 4y ago
I agree. I can't even remember why I was so scared of trying out email + path workflow, but after trying it for just 1 time I was convinced. It is so obviously good way to manage patches, you get a unified interface to bugs, patches, communication and everything in-between. I can understand some folks not wanting to do initial setup and sourcehut already provides a nice web interface for it. But for actually contributing stuff emails are pretty unbeatable IMO.
Dave3of5 4y ago
How do you setup a plain git server is there a step by step anywhere I could follow ?
- hrbf 4y ago
  Funny you should ask. I had actually written this up back then – for a FreeBSD install because it’s what I use. https://herrbischoff.com/2021/10/how-to-install-cgit-with-gitolite-and-nginx-on-freebsd-13/ https://herrbischoff.com/2021/10/how-to-install-cgit-with-gi... I’ve also tripped over something regarding “master” and “main” branches that’s easily fixed: https://herrbischoff.com/2022/05/cgit-missing-idle-column-on-some-repositories/ https://herrbischoff.com/2022/05/cgit-missing-idle-column-on... If you want it even simpler, just run mkdir repo.git && cd repo.git git init —bare in a folder on a server you have SSH access to and clone it on your local machine like git clone user@server:/path/to/repo.git

drej 4y ago

For me the main deterrent from Gitea has been their approach to UI design. The shameless inspiration (if you can call it that) they took from Github is pretty startling, the two interfaces look pretty much identical (well, Github has recently redesigned its repo page, but many can remember the old design). Sure, get inspired, make something similar here or there, but this is an outright copy of the whole product design.

tpxl 4y ago
I just compared Gitea and Gitlab side-by-side and they're very, very similar. So either there's also copying between GitHub and Gitlab, or the design of git lends itself to a very specific interface.
- KronisLV 4y ago
  > So either there's also copying between GitHub and Gitlab Isn't it likely that there's just a certain kind of interface and functionality that both works and people have also gotten used to it over time? It might make a lot of sense to copy it to at least some degree, instead of reinventing the wheel: if you look at MS Office and something like LibreOffice, you'll notice that both of the spreadsheet apps are rather similar (and you can even enable a ribbon interface in LibreOffice, if you want). I think the same more or less applies to every piece of software, from how phone OSes look, to how desktop environments look and work, as well as why the majority of websites out there look a bit samey.
  - tpxl 4y ago
    > Isn't it likely that there's just a certain kind of interface and functionality that both works and people have also gotten used to it over time? This is what I meant by 'design of git lends itself to a very specific interface'. Git has branches, commits, merging, rebasing, ... It makes sense for a UI interface over git to show data git itself shows. I also find little wrong with copying UI elements, where it works. The result is better software all around.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

roastedpeacock 4y ago

What jurisdiction will the organisation be registered in and in the unlikely event of a dispute how will that impact the project?

rapnie 4y ago
It is apparently based in Hong Kong.
- roastedpeacock 4y ago
  Given recent regressions in Hong Kong that may not be the best idea.

olavgg 4y ago

I am a big fan of Gitea, it does exactly what I wants it too and its very easy to maintain over time. I run it together with ZFS and SQLite. This enables atomic snapshot of both the database and git repository. And this is of course replicated to another system. SQLite is plenty fast, people should avoid more complex solutions using PostgreSQL or MySQL. I've also configured SSO with Azure Active Directory which everyone with mail from Microsoft has access for free. For the past few years I've completed a few dozen upgrades, only 2 times it has broken. One was a new configuration property I needed to add, and one was that I upgraded GoLang a bit too early and Gitea didn't support it. Compared to many other open source projects, Gitea is a joy to use and run. And I hope it will stay like this for another 10 years.

dachary 4y ago
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.
- throwaccount12 4y ago
  > The entire community The blog post says maintainers have been hired, as well as the Blender blog post is months old, seems like this has been public knowledge for a while, but that it is just formally being announced now. Edit: seems I am getting downvoted, but I searched dachary who has a financial interest in Gitea, and has posted about the company in the past, so he clearly has known about this for a while. I wonder why he happens to not mention a conflict.
  - jonnytran 4y ago
    I currently work for a company where one of my co-workers is a maintainer of the official Gitea repo. There was no mention of this anywhere prior to the blog post, including in private Discord channels. It has _not_ been public knowledge for a while. What you said is false. I suspect that is why you're getting downvoted.

lvncelot 4y ago

> If you are a company and rely on Gitea, especially for critical operations, please get in touch as we are now able to offer: > [...] > An enhanced enterprise version It's sad to see Gitea not receiving enough donations/funding to stay afloat, and I obviously can't fault them for taking the necessary steps to generate revenue, but it's also sad to see it eventually going open-core. (Which is how I read the announcement)

dachary 4y ago
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.
- MaxBarraclough 4y ago
  Great points. I agree there will be a backlash from contributors. As far as I can tell they don't ask contributors to hand over copyrights, but they use the permissive MIT-style licence which permits the creation of non-Free forks. Drew DeVault, of SourceHut fame, has written on this topic. [0][1] Drew's opinion is that he probably couldn't easily turn SourceHut to the 'open core' model even if he wanted to, on account of its use of AGPL-licensed code from contributors (who retain the copyrights). [0] https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-10-09-ip-assignment-or-lack-thereof/ https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-10-09-ip-assignment-or-lack-... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31963559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31963559
  - throwaccount12 4y ago
    AGPL has a bad reputation because it has been weaponized against the community from companies like Elastic.
    - MaxBarraclough 4y ago

goodpoint 4y ago

> there are a few corporations (with revenues that are greater than some countries GDP) are building on Gitea for core products without even contributing back enhancements That's exactly what you get when you release Gitea under MIT. What they are looking for is AGPL.

Aachen 4y ago
Yeah I was fully expecting a licence change with that preamble. And then they mention DAO ._. GPL scares people for stupid reasons (stupid from my fanatical perspective that if you use open source software, of course your derivatives ought to be open as well), Gitea honestly might be so popular because it had a more free license than GPL. Doesn't mean I'm sad to see they're not even trying to make these changes be contributed back going forward.
- goodpoint 4y ago
  > Gitea honestly might be so popular because it had a more free license than GPL Citation needed.
  - Aachen 4y ago
    Citation for a hunch is pretty hard to give
  - rapnie 4y ago
    > more free That is in the eye of the beholder. Phrasing as 'more permissive' is more accurate.
    - Aachen 4y ago
      To me those are synonyms, but I'm not a native speaker. When you're allowed to do more things, such as taking open source code and using it without ever contributing anything back even if you distribute compiled versions of these people's work for exorbitant fees, aren't you more "free" to do what you want than if this were restricted in any way? I'm not saying I morally agree with it, but that's what I understand the word to mean.

fractalf 4y ago

Why not just use shaming to get big companies to contribute? Name them, keep a list, put them on display. I mean, they should be ashamed to use a free open source and not contributing in any way.

tsegers 4y ago
Using software in accordance with the terms of its licence is not shameful.

sebazzz 4y ago

> An enhanced enterprise version But still open source?

sangnoir 4y ago

Oh, fuck - I had a good run I guess: I love Gitea, but this seems like a change for the worse. I think there's an open source trap where successful projects see their adoption numbers, and billion-dollar companies using their projects and think "We're leaving money on the table" (which IMO is the whole point of libre software). Unfortunately, this is the path to weird software licenses, open-core / community-edition product splits and a whole host that makes the software less useful to me as an individual user and occasional contributor. Besides, Gitea won't be able to make much out of individuals like me, so their roadmap will likely favor paying customers. I can guarantee that it will be too bloated to run on a Raspberry Pi Zero like I have it today, which means I'd have to choose something else. I also suspect that switching to a for-profit company will decrease the number of volunteer contributions, after all following the same big idea that led to incorporation: who wants to work for free when someone else is making the money? The good news about F/OSS is I have started my countdown to a community fork. After all, Gitea itself is a fork -it is the circle of life. Edit: I forgot they are trying to pay contributors with some web3 scheme, perhaps to try and solve the inherent hypocrisy. But the cure may be worse than the disease because it further complicates the process of contributing to the project and reduces maintainer focus on actual product. Just give me pull-requests.

throwaccount12 4y ago
The DAO was mentioned only around transparent governance and giving back to the community, but the blog post mentions hiring maintainers presumably with cash.
- sangnoir 4y ago
  You seem extremely vested[1] in this, and have been very active in this thread - are you affiliated with the freshly-registered company? If so, I'd encourage you not to hide behind a throwaway because it gives the impression that you don't want to stand by your words. More on topic: does this mean occasional/casual contributors to the project will continue to work for free while maintainers & employees get paid? 1. You looked up the name of one commenter and the donations made in their name 3 years ago.

techknowlogick 4y ago

Hi everyone. I'm the author of the blog post above, and I am sorry that I caused so much confusion. I have spent much of today trying to clear things up, and will be writing a follow up to the post. I see some concern around the mention of a DAO, I tried to get across in the blog post that community is incredibly important, and so I mentioned it as a possible way to ensure community governance, not to create a cryptocurrency and sell that. I mentioned it to be entirely transparent that it was a way that we are possibly investigating to make sure community is still involved. Thanks to our paying clients, the company has been able to hire some maintainers, and contribute back the changes we've made back to the project so everyone can benefit. We are also looking into establishing a fund to not only pay contributors, but also projects we rely on.

sneak 4y ago
What does “enhanced enterprise version” mean? Proprietary software?
_pfxa 4y ago
You say in the blog post itself > To preserve the community aspect of Gitea we are experimenting with creating a decentralized autonomous organization where contributors would receive benefits based on their participation such as from code, documentation, translations, and perhaps even assisting individual community members with support questions. This is a DAO where you earn scrip through a gamified version of FOSS development. This has nothing to do with "community" (which is a word I'm pretty sick of hearing coming from the mouths of software devs and tech companies).
dachary 4y ago
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.