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Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea

blog.gitea.io

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Re: Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea

#141

Post by WorldMaker »

leppr wrote: post #34
remram wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They mention "a decentralized autonomous organization" which is a blockchain invention (a "smart contract" thingie): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_autonomous_organ...

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 resou…

Stack Overflow was developed as (and is still operated as) a for-profit/profit-motivated Corporation (Stack Exchange Inc.). No one considers it a DAO in any form, especially not the "autonomous" part. Unless you mean the gamified community elements, but you can't really call that an "organization" either because it's entirely disorganized (and sometimes highly dysfunctional) beyond the game mechanics and more importantly extremely centralized to Stack Overflow's servers.

Wikipedia is run as a not-for-profit Foundation (Wikimedia Foundation). It doesn't seem anything like DAO either. Again, unless you mean the community of contributors to Wikipedia, and that also is extremely centralized to Wikipedia servers and doesn't have anything resembling "autonomous", not even something resembling Stack Overflow's game mechanics.

The "autonomous" in DAO still only means "smart contracts" and no one is using DAO as a term for traditional corporate structures other than those intentionally confused by or wishing to confuse what "autonomous" means in the acronym.

Re: Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea

#142

Post by BrandoElFollito »

throwaccount12 wrote: post #113
remram wrote: 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

Quoted post unavailable.

How do you know their name?

Re: Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea

#143

Post by jonnytran »

throwaccount12 wrote: post #118
dachary wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

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.

Re: Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea

#144

Post by techknowlogick »

simonw wrote: post #3

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.

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.

Re: Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea

#145

Post by techknowlogick »

anotherrandom wrote: post #136
remram wrote: 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

They didn't mention any currency creation, they only mentioned the creation of a DAO. That's a far cry from trying to make a currency

Hi, I'm the author of the post. That is correct, I mentioned a DAO as a possible way we are investigating for empowering the community, we are very much not trying to make a new currency.

Re: Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea

#146

Post by techknowlogick »

phinnaeus wrote: post #12

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/ ] it's because you switched up which braces go where for a markdown link. should be [text](link)

Hi, thanks! I'm the author of the blog post, and I'm not sure if you were the person who pointed it out in chat, but I have since fixed it thanks to that heads up.

Re: Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea

#147

Post by smlavine »

Aachen wrote: post #80
trevyn wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is literally the easiest inclusive way that works beyond a single country's borders. Easier for me would be iDeal, but that's not easier for you unless you're also Dutch. Easier for people in the USA might be credit cards, but those are issued only if you have a credit rating at all and the rating is good (I don't meet the former condition so bank said no), and surely transferring money from anywhere in the worl…

> Easier for people in the USA might be credit cards, but those are issued only if you have a credit rating at all and the rating is good

Debit cards are effectively the same as credit cards for this purpose, paying for things online. Many (if not most) banks and credit unions in the USA will issue you a free debit card upon opening an account, some without even needing to put any money into the account.

Re: Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea

#148

Post by techknowlogick »

sangnoir wrote: post #121

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…

Hi, I'm the author of the blog post. Thank you for your comment. In reference to your edit, we are investigating a DAO to empower the community, but aren't committed to it, only investigating it to see if it is viable. In terms of funding the community, we are committed to creating a fund with non-crypto money to be able to give back.

In terms of "leaving money on the table" this is very much not that, open source is incredibly non-equitable and skews a lot to a certain way (a lot of people with who can afford to give up time to open source, not everyone but a large amount). This prevents many who have a desire to work on projects such as Gitea, but need to find a job or two to pay rent and get groceries. By establishing what we have, we are hopefully broadening the pool of people who are able to participate.

Re: Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea

#149

Post by techknowlogick »

trevyn wrote: post #39
rapnie wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Hi, I'm the author of the blog post, but also a member of the codeberg prasidium. Thank you for this feedback I will bring it back, and hopefully lessen the barrier to join.

Re: Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea

#150

Post by MaxBarraclough »

dachary wrote: post #72
lvncelot wrote: post #71

> 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 announcem…

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.

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-...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31963559

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