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He may be, but also contributes quite heavily to the open source repo and sponsors bounties. It may not absolve him of profit motive, but at least earns the rig

He may be, but also contributes quite heavily to the open source repo and sponsors bounties. It may not absolve him of profit motive, but at least earns the right to critique the Gitea administration.

evanelias 2y ago
I don't see how it gives him the right to critique the maintainers over this specific topic and situation. He clearly has no qualms about profiting from their work himself. So why does he have a problem with them profiting from other contributors' work? Gitea's stance regarding why certain features are Enterprise-only is quite reasonable: "Many features, and enhancements are prevented from being included in the Gitea project due to high upfront costs, and lack of resources to maintain them. This leads to them not being developed or accepted into the project. With this offering, we are able to provide a version to paying customers with a support contract, allowing us to develop and maintain these features for the Gitea project." https://docs.gitea.com/enterprise/faq#why-is-this-a-paid-offering https://docs.gitea.com/enterprise/faq#why-is-this-a-paid-off... That certainly sounds like it would apply to this particular PR, which is a 4000-line diff affecting 144 files, and with a 350+ comment discussion history spanning over 16 months. Review, cleanup, and long-term maintenance for this sort of PR are faaaaar from free. I can understand 100% why this would be an Enterprise-only feature, and complaints about the maintainers' profit motive in that context seem utterly ridiculous to me. Especially when the commenter is complaining about a "massive conflict of interest" when not mentioning his own extremely similar conflict of interest.
- ironmagma 2y ago
  If it’s good enough to merge into the enterprise branch, it’s good enough to merge into the community branch. It may be expensive; that’s why there was a community-funded bounty placed on it. If the complaint is that Gitea is too complex to maintain for free, then great, start a company around it to fund a private fork. But then you shouldn’t be allowed to stop the community from merging their own crap in their own fork that they maintain and care about. Since Gitea LTD is the gatekeeper of both repos, that is the conflict of interest.
  - evanelias 2y ago
    > If it’s good enough to merge into the enterprise branch, it’s good enough to merge into the community branch. It's not clear yet that the Enterprise version of this feature is the same code as this PR, right? Do you have evidence otherwise? > It may be expensive; that’s why there was a community-funded bounty placed on it. How much was the bounty, who funded it, and who receives it? I don't see any information about that on the PR or the linked issue. > you shouldn’t be allowed to stop the community from merging their own crap in their own fork that they maintain If the community really maintains it 100%, then they would all be maintainers and by definition they would be able to merge it already. That doesn't appear to be the situation here. > Since Gitea LTD is the gatekeeper of both repos, that is the conflict of interest. Do you really think it is accurate to say Gitea LTD is merely gatekeeping and not actually doing a ton of work to steer and maintain this project? And since the complaining commenter is CTO of a company who benefits from being able to include this feature in his company's own private fork, doesn't he have a conflict of interest as well?
    - ironmagma 2y ago
      > Do you really think it is accurate to say Gitea LTD is merely gatekeeping and not actually doing a ton of work to steer and maintain this project? Absolutely not, and I never made that claim. > How much was the bounty, who funded it, and who receives it? I happen to have some inside knowledge here, that at least Allspice and Copia provided parts of the bounty. Some of that is mentioned in the thread but the transparency could be better. > Do you have evidence otherwise? That was the thrust of the submission. I tried to link the fragment but I don't think Hacker News allows that and erased it: "Unfortunately, they have already merged a version of this code into the private gitea repo and are charging $$ for it. So Gitea Ltd. (owners group) has no incentive to review and merge this in an open source repo, even though the open source community has funded and developed it." As for conflicts of interest, perhaps. Who knows the actual extent of it? Posting here is intended a matter of visibility rather than activism; that's why I'm so surprised that the thread was closed on grounds of brigading, since that was neither the intended nor the actual effect.
      - 2y ago

evanelias 2y ago

I don't see how it gives him the right to critique the maintainers over this specific topic and situation. He clearly has no qualms about profiting from their work himself. So why does he have a problem with them profiting from other contributors' work? Gitea's stance regarding why certain features are Enterprise-only is quite reasonable: "Many features, and enhancements are prevented from being included in the Gitea project due to high upfront costs, and lack of resources to maintain them. This leads to them not being developed or accepted into the project. With this offering, we are able to provide a version to paying customers with a support contract, allowing us to develop and maintain these features for the Gitea project." https://docs.gitea.com/enterprise/faq#why-is-this-a-paid-offering https://docs.gitea.com/enterprise/faq#why-is-this-a-paid-off... That certainly sounds like it would apply to this particular PR, which is a 4000-line diff affecting 144 files, and with a 350+ comment discussion history spanning over 16 months. Review, cleanup, and long-term maintenance for this sort of PR are faaaaar from free. I can understand 100% why this would be an Enterprise-only feature, and complaints about the maintainers' profit motive in that context seem utterly ridiculous to me. Especially when the commenter is complaining about a "massive conflict of interest" when not mentioning his own extremely similar conflict of interest.

ironmagma 2y ago
If it’s good enough to merge into the enterprise branch, it’s good enough to merge into the community branch. It may be expensive; that’s why there was a community-funded bounty placed on it. If the complaint is that Gitea is too complex to maintain for free, then great, start a company around it to fund a private fork. But then you shouldn’t be allowed to stop the community from merging their own crap in their own fork that they maintain and care about. Since Gitea LTD is the gatekeeper of both repos, that is the conflict of interest.
- evanelias 2y ago
  > If it’s good enough to merge into the enterprise branch, it’s good enough to merge into the community branch. It's not clear yet that the Enterprise version of this feature is the same code as this PR, right? Do you have evidence otherwise? > It may be expensive; that’s why there was a community-funded bounty placed on it. How much was the bounty, who funded it, and who receives it? I don't see any information about that on the PR or the linked issue. > you shouldn’t be allowed to stop the community from merging their own crap in their own fork that they maintain If the community really maintains it 100%, then they would all be maintainers and by definition they would be able to merge it already. That doesn't appear to be the situation here. > Since Gitea LTD is the gatekeeper of both repos, that is the conflict of interest. Do you really think it is accurate to say Gitea LTD is merely gatekeeping and not actually doing a ton of work to steer and maintain this project? And since the complaining commenter is CTO of a company who benefits from being able to include this feature in his company's own private fork, doesn't he have a conflict of interest as well?
  - ironmagma 2y ago
    > Do you really think it is accurate to say Gitea LTD is merely gatekeeping and not actually doing a ton of work to steer and maintain this project? Absolutely not, and I never made that claim. > How much was the bounty, who funded it, and who receives it? I happen to have some inside knowledge here, that at least Allspice and Copia provided parts of the bounty. Some of that is mentioned in the thread but the transparency could be better. > Do you have evidence otherwise? That was the thrust of the submission. I tried to link the fragment but I don't think Hacker News allows that and erased it: "Unfortunately, they have already merged a version of this code into the private gitea repo and are charging $$ for it. So Gitea Ltd. (owners group) has no incentive to review and merge this in an open source repo, even though the open source community has funded and developed it." As for conflicts of interest, perhaps. Who knows the actual extent of it? Posting here is intended a matter of visibility rather than activism; that's why I'm so surprised that the thread was closed on grounds of brigading, since that was neither the intended nor the actual effect.
    - 2y ago