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Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea

blog.gitea.io

111–120 of 187 posts

Re: Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty much my sentiment as well. The problem is that the obscure integration problems are better solved by a system integrator if they are so bespoke they don't belong in the code base. I've worked with enterprise customers before and yes it tend to be LDAP and active directory stuff they ask for in terms of features. I run my own LDAP, am I enterprise? Further this undermines their argument. It comes off as…

So, yes, (to answer both followups here) - obviously there's a danger that the OSS version gets less time and attention, and in many cases it'll start prioritising actual customers (ie those paying money) over folks using the OSS version. I certainly understand why those who are using software for free see this as the thin-edge-of-the-wedge, the start of the product morphing to something that is less free. On the oth…

I understand all of this. I'm a software engineer myself, and FLOSS advocate.

The "complaint" is not that I don't understand _why_ this is happening, or even so much that it _is_ happening, but in my experience, this "commercialisation" of F/L/OSS is inevitably (I'd argue) net negative for the community built around it.

Even if the core product doesn't become "paid" and we don't have this issue of whether or not people _should_ have to pay to use it, the quality of the "core" or "community" product will fall, anything new or interesting will get pay-walled and updates/features will be few and far between.

I'd call this more lamentation of a loss than anything, Gitea isn't dead (yet) because of this, but I move forward cautiously to see what comes of it.

What would be really interesting, would be to revisit this discussion in a year, two, maybe more and see what became of it.

Re: Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea

#113
post #5

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

No post body was provided.

Re: Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, bank accounts for commercial purpose have different fees, but unless they pick a completely stupid bank it's still multiple orders of magnitude cheaper than any other transfer. Only downside of SEPA is that it is a lot less common outside EU/Europe and then more expensive and instant payment is not really possible (there are some vendors offering solutions ...) but that doesn't seem to be their aim. (Would be: "…

> Only downside of SEPA is that it is a lot less common outside EU/Europe SEPA stands for "Single Euro Payments Area" and was build for the EU/Europe, I don't think it's available outside of Europe.

Can you not just enter an international bank account number (IBAN) into online banking outside of this area? How does transferring money work then, do you need to send couriers with cash or use third parties like paypal? IBAN is the most basic infrastructure I know of, and I've heard that in the past you also had bank routing so this paying via banks (and banks settling it later) can't be new.

I should ask my boss how we get money from customers in other countries. As far as I knew we just give them our IBAN, chamber of commerce number for tax reasons, and it just appears in our account.

Re: Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea

#115
post #66

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.

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

Is it? The blog post calls out their participation with Blender, and reading the linked blender posts and videos where they talk about their work with the company they talk about the relationship being entirely about providing advice and support, I don't think blender bought some closed source software.

Re: Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea

#116
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gitea honestly might be so popular because it had a more free license than GPL Citation needed.

> more free That is in the eye of the beholder. Phrasing as 'more permissive' is more accurate.

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.

Re: Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea

#117
post #32

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 deve…

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…

You say "one of the larger contributors upstream" do you have a source for that? Because I took a look at the contributor list, and couldn't find any evidence of that.

Re: Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea

#118
post #73
post #68

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 every…

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.

> 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.

Re: Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea

#119
post #10
post #4

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".

> 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.

I took a look at Gitea's Open Collective, and they have something like $300 coming in each month, and that there is a large amount in the account because of a few large companies, but not re-occurring ones.
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