9 ms·

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

106 points by fariszr 4y ago

mellosouls 4y ago
Context, last few days here: Open Letter to Gitea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33372471 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33372471 Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33339421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33339421
candiddevmike 4y ago
> I created Gitea No mention of Gogs anywhere, really classy. (Gitea is a fork of Gogs)
- Kiro 4y ago
  > Gitea was created by Lunny Xiao, who was also a founder of the self-hosted Git service Gogs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitea
  - westurner 4y ago
    Gogs is a clone of GitHub and GitLab (which were both originally written in Ruby with the Ruby on Rails CoC Convention-over-Configuration Web Framework), which were built because Trac didn't support Git or multiple projects, Sourceforge didn't support Git or on-prem, and git patchbombs as attachments over emailing lists needed Pull Requests, and Issues and PRs should pull from the same sequence of autoincrement (*) integer keys. - You can do ~GitHub Pages with Gitea and an idempotent git post-receive-hook that builds static HTML from a repo revision, tests, deploys to revid/ and updates a latest/ symlimk, and logs; or with HTTP webhooks. - "Feature: Allow interacting with tickets via email" https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/2386#issuecomment-672646505 https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/2386#issuecomment-6... - It's not safe to host Gitea on the same server as the CI (e.g. DroneCI) host if you grant permissions to the docker socket to the CI container: you need another VM at least to run the CI controller and workers on_push() with Gitea. https://docs.drone.io/server/provider/gitea/ https://docs.drone.io/server/provider/gitea/ : > Please note we strongly recommend installing Drone on a dedicated instance. We do not recommend installing Drone and Gitea on the same machine due to network complications, and we definitely do not recommend installing Drone and Gitea on the same machine using docker-compose. GitHub and GitLab centralize git for project-based collaboration, which is itself a distributed system.
- mhd 4y ago
  Probably not the wisest time to mention the concept of forking.
- remram 4y ago
  Or their previous system based on voting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33373254 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#owners https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#...
  - rurban 4y ago
    2 of the 3 current owners agreed with this, so it was democratic.
    - remram 4y ago
      Arguably. There was no process outlined to change the process. In most democracies, the leader can't change to a non-democracy just because he is currently the leader.
      - ipaddr 4y ago
        Sure they can and we've seen examples in Africa and elsewhere like Germany in the 30s. We have also seen the way Russia pretends a democracy exists and promos voting while jailing opposition party leaders. I would say most democracies around the world are propped up by a strong military not the strong will of the people for democracy
        remram 4y ago
        Are you taking Nazi Germany as a example of what one can do?
        ipaddr 4y ago
        One example..
        maxbond 4y ago
        Democracies succumbing to coups is a democratic process like dying is a life process. It's something the system is prone to doing sure, but after that, it is no longer the same system. To put it another way, eggs are prone to being made into omelettes, but after you do so, it is no longer an egg, and it is no longer capable of becoming a chicken; once you pervert a democracy, it is no longer a democracy, and is no longer capable of representing the people. There's a sort of "reverse no true Scotsman" happening here because of a confusion of terms which creates the illusion of a contradiction. The claim was, "it is undemocratic for leaders to change the system in an anti-democratic way, despite being elected;" this is a claim about how democracies ought to work. Your counterclaim was, "this has happened historically in democracies" - a true claim about history, but these claims are not actually in contradiction and indeed both of them are true. Like how if I said, "cars drive on four wheels," it wouldn't be a contradiction for if you showed me a car which had three wheels because it had lost one in an accident.
- mariusor 4y ago
  I interpret that as "I created the Gitea project" not I have written Gitea from scratch.
  - oefrha 4y ago
    It can be technically accurate and distasteful at the same time. I would expect at least a nod to gogs in “our beginnings”.
wokwokwok 4y ago
> 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.
- zitterbewegung 4y ago
  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 .
  - fabrice_d 4y ago
    It's not "everyone has a vote". Some have more voting powers than others: "provides contributors with greater participation to have more votes" Typically you can expect Gitea Ltd. employees to have greater participation.
- dachary 4y ago
  > The answer is bluntly; no. I share the same conclusion. It is time to fork.
  - aliqot 4y ago
    > time to fork. Knew you'd come around. Now I just need Rapnie from the other day to put their blessing on it and we can call this a done deal.
marcinzm 4y ago
>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#owners 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.
pinkcan 4y ago
call the fork gitcafe
- prionassembly 4y ago
  Gitmate (much stronger) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mate_(drink) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mate_(drink)
  - candiddevmike 4y ago
    Gitbawls
    - Yahivin 4y ago
      GitFourLoko
- remram 4y ago
  I like it. It keeps the beverage theme while having a more obvious pronunciation and the implication of a place to be social. Nice.
- em-bee 4y ago
  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.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20160121084706/https://gitcafe.co...) so it[s probably ok to reuse the name now.
layer8 4y ago
Looks like Gitea will get forked.
- ipaddr 4y ago
  I look forward to a new name. Gitea always sounded awful.
  - remram 4y ago
    As a non-native English speaker, I never know how to pronounce it. I know it's supposed to be git-tea but in my head it's more git-eh-ah.
    - Shared404 4y ago
      As a native English speaker I'm just now realizing the same.
    - rascul 4y ago
      I'm a native English speaker and luckily I've never found the need to pronounce gitea. In my head, it'll randomly either be "git-tea" or "git-e-ah".
    - ilyt 4y ago
      Do they have pronunciation guide? Thought it's just gi-tea
      - Deukhoofd 4y ago
        They do, it's the first question in the FAQ. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EM71-2uDAoY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EM71-2uDAoY
  - EamonnMR 4y ago
    I've been following the story all morning and only now just realized it's tea like the beverage.
- 4y ago
Retr0id 4y ago
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.
- sirsinsalot 4y ago
  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.
  - maxbond 4y ago
    Earnest question; is unkillability a desirable quality in a system? Put another way, is it responsible to engineer a machine that has no off switch?
dachary 4y ago
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/ https://gitea-open-letter.coding.social/updates/
- maxbond 4y ago
  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.
  - tpxl 4y ago
    Godot has a similar structure. The engine is MIT licensed, it's a member project of the Software Freedom Conservancy and one of the lead developers has a company that does Switch and PlayStation ports. The only difference between this and Gitea that I see is who owns the trademarks or whatever (SFC vs the gitea company), and everyone's fine with the way things run in Godot.
    - Macha 4y ago
      Compare Godot's governance page (https://godotengine.org/governance https://godotengine.org/governance) with this blog post and the previous one. Godot's governance page indicates, clearly, that Godot is owned by the community and SFC is empowered to ensure that happens. There's no acknowledgement of the existence of W4Games (who are also not called Godot Engine Ltd), much less any governance role. This makes W4Game's position as "just one consulting company amongst many" which is much more palatable. If W4 wanted to take Godot to an open core or visible source model then, it would have to fork, despite containing the lead developers. The worry here is that Gitea Limited will be in the same position as ElasticSearch in a few years and they've given no structural roadblocks against that while dropping community leadership for commercial leadership
Kukumber 4y ago
That's the beginning of the end, this story is not unique unfortunately
ddevault 4y ago
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.
- nwellnhof 4y ago
  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.
  - ilyt 4y ago
    > Copyleft only stops someone from distributing changes as closed source. That "only" is the important part. Having to change label attached to it is annoying, but copyleft is crucial
  - ddevault 4y ago
    >as long as it stays open source This is the important part.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - 4y ago
kodah 4y ago
Would it be possible to make something like gitea that's federated on the issues level? I feel like that'd be really useful.
- jolheiser 4y ago
  Gitea has been working on federation, slowly but surely.
  - dachary 4y ago
    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-conclusion-october-2021-october-2022/5981 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
emaro 4y ago
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.
MatthiasPortzel 4y ago
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.
- Brian_K_White 4y ago
  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)
tough 4y ago
So one can now say gitea, is no longer his cup of tea.
debdut 4y ago
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
- yencabulator 4y ago
  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.
anxiously 4y ago
My decision to use gitrc over gitea is looking better and better…
zaroth 4y ago
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?
isitmadeofglass 4y ago
> 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.

106 points by fariszr 4y ago

Context, last few days here: Open Letter to Gitea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33372471 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33372471 Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33339421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33339421

candiddevmike 4y ago

> I created Gitea No mention of Gogs anywhere, really classy. (Gitea is a fork of Gogs)

Kiro 4y ago
> Gitea was created by Lunny Xiao, who was also a founder of the self-hosted Git service Gogs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitea
- westurner 4y ago
  Gogs is a clone of GitHub and GitLab (which were both originally written in Ruby with the Ruby on Rails CoC Convention-over-Configuration Web Framework), which were built because Trac didn't support Git or multiple projects, Sourceforge didn't support Git or on-prem, and git patchbombs as attachments over emailing lists needed Pull Requests, and Issues and PRs should pull from the same sequence of autoincrement (*) integer keys. - You can do ~GitHub Pages with Gitea and an idempotent git post-receive-hook that builds static HTML from a repo revision, tests, deploys to revid/ and updates a latest/ symlimk, and logs; or with HTTP webhooks. - "Feature: Allow interacting with tickets via email" https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/2386#issuecomment-672646505 https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/2386#issuecomment-6... - It's not safe to host Gitea on the same server as the CI (e.g. DroneCI) host if you grant permissions to the docker socket to the CI container: you need another VM at least to run the CI controller and workers on_push() with Gitea. https://docs.drone.io/server/provider/gitea/ https://docs.drone.io/server/provider/gitea/ : > Please note we strongly recommend installing Drone on a dedicated instance. We do not recommend installing Drone and Gitea on the same machine due to network complications, and we definitely do not recommend installing Drone and Gitea on the same machine using docker-compose. GitHub and GitLab centralize git for project-based collaboration, which is itself a distributed system.
mhd 4y ago
Probably not the wisest time to mention the concept of forking.
remram 4y ago
Or their previous system based on voting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33373254 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#owners https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#...
- rurban 4y ago
  2 of the 3 current owners agreed with this, so it was democratic.
  - remram 4y ago
    Arguably. There was no process outlined to change the process. In most democracies, the leader can't change to a non-democracy just because he is currently the leader.
    - ipaddr 4y ago
      Sure they can and we've seen examples in Africa and elsewhere like Germany in the 30s. We have also seen the way Russia pretends a democracy exists and promos voting while jailing opposition party leaders. I would say most democracies around the world are propped up by a strong military not the strong will of the people for democracy
      - remram 4y ago
        Are you taking Nazi Germany as a example of what one can do?
        ipaddr 4y ago
        One example..
      - maxbond 4y ago
        Democracies succumbing to coups is a democratic process like dying is a life process. It's something the system is prone to doing sure, but after that, it is no longer the same system. To put it another way, eggs are prone to being made into omelettes, but after you do so, it is no longer an egg, and it is no longer capable of becoming a chicken; once you pervert a democracy, it is no longer a democracy, and is no longer capable of representing the people. There's a sort of "reverse no true Scotsman" happening here because of a confusion of terms which creates the illusion of a contradiction. The claim was, "it is undemocratic for leaders to change the system in an anti-democratic way, despite being elected;" this is a claim about how democracies ought to work. Your counterclaim was, "this has happened historically in democracies" - a true claim about history, but these claims are not actually in contradiction and indeed both of them are true. Like how if I said, "cars drive on four wheels," it wouldn't be a contradiction for if you showed me a car which had three wheels because it had lost one in an accident.
mariusor 4y ago
I interpret that as "I created the Gitea project" not I have written Gitea from scratch.
- oefrha 4y ago
  It can be technically accurate and distasteful at the same time. I would expect at least a nod to gogs in “our beginnings”.

wokwokwok 4y ago

> 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.

zitterbewegung 4y ago
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 .
- fabrice_d 4y ago
  It's not "everyone has a vote". Some have more voting powers than others: "provides contributors with greater participation to have more votes" Typically you can expect Gitea Ltd. employees to have greater participation.
dachary 4y ago
> The answer is bluntly; no. I share the same conclusion. It is time to fork.
- aliqot 4y ago
  > time to fork. Knew you'd come around. Now I just need Rapnie from the other day to put their blessing on it and we can call this a done deal.

marcinzm 4y ago

>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#owners 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.

pinkcan 4y ago

call the fork gitcafe

prionassembly 4y ago
Gitmate (much stronger) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mate_(drink) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mate_(drink)
- candiddevmike 4y ago
  Gitbawls
  - Yahivin 4y ago
    GitFourLoko
remram 4y ago
I like it. It keeps the beverage theme while having a more obvious pronunciation and the implication of a place to be social. Nice.
em-bee 4y ago
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.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20160121084706/https://gitcafe.co...) so it[s probably ok to reuse the name now.

layer8 4y ago

Looks like Gitea will get forked.

ipaddr 4y ago
I look forward to a new name. Gitea always sounded awful.
- remram 4y ago
  As a non-native English speaker, I never know how to pronounce it. I know it's supposed to be git-tea but in my head it's more git-eh-ah.
  - Shared404 4y ago
    As a native English speaker I'm just now realizing the same.
  - rascul 4y ago
    I'm a native English speaker and luckily I've never found the need to pronounce gitea. In my head, it'll randomly either be "git-tea" or "git-e-ah".
  - ilyt 4y ago
    Do they have pronunciation guide? Thought it's just gi-tea
    - Deukhoofd 4y ago
      They do, it's the first question in the FAQ. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EM71-2uDAoY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EM71-2uDAoY
- EamonnMR 4y ago
  I've been following the story all morning and only now just realized it's tea like the beverage.
4y ago

Retr0id 4y ago

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.

sirsinsalot 4y ago
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.
- maxbond 4y ago
  Earnest question; is unkillability a desirable quality in a system? Put another way, is it responsible to engineer a machine that has no off switch?

dachary 4y ago

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/ https://gitea-open-letter.coding.social/updates/

maxbond 4y ago
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.
- tpxl 4y ago
  Godot has a similar structure. The engine is MIT licensed, it's a member project of the Software Freedom Conservancy and one of the lead developers has a company that does Switch and PlayStation ports. The only difference between this and Gitea that I see is who owns the trademarks or whatever (SFC vs the gitea company), and everyone's fine with the way things run in Godot.
  - Macha 4y ago
    Compare Godot's governance page (https://godotengine.org/governance https://godotengine.org/governance) with this blog post and the previous one. Godot's governance page indicates, clearly, that Godot is owned by the community and SFC is empowered to ensure that happens. There's no acknowledgement of the existence of W4Games (who are also not called Godot Engine Ltd), much less any governance role. This makes W4Game's position as "just one consulting company amongst many" which is much more palatable. If W4 wanted to take Godot to an open core or visible source model then, it would have to fork, despite containing the lead developers. The worry here is that Gitea Limited will be in the same position as ElasticSearch in a few years and they've given no structural roadblocks against that while dropping community leadership for commercial leadership

Kukumber 4y ago

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

ddevault 4y ago

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.

nwellnhof 4y ago
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.
- ilyt 4y ago
  > Copyleft only stops someone from distributing changes as closed source. That "only" is the important part. Having to change label attached to it is annoying, but copyleft is crucial
- ddevault 4y ago
  >as long as it stays open source This is the important part.
- deleted 4y ago
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- 4y ago

kodah 4y ago

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

jolheiser 4y ago
Gitea has been working on federation, slowly but surely.
- dachary 4y ago
  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-conclusion-october-2021-october-2022/5981 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

emaro 4y ago

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.

MatthiasPortzel 4y ago

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.

Brian_K_White 4y ago
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)

tough 4y ago

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

debdut 4y ago

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

yencabulator 4y ago
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.

anxiously 4y ago

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

zaroth 4y ago

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?

isitmadeofglass 4y ago

> 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.