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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

#171

Post by hrbf »

techknowlogick wrote: post #160
hrbf wrote: post #37

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 yo…

Hi, I'm the author of the blog post. Thank you for your comment. A project you may find interesting is soft-serve from charm.sh https://github.com/charmbracelet/soft-serve it's a "TUI" (terminal user interface).

Thanks, it appears to serve the same function as gitolite, which I use in my setup and somehow forgot to mention. The SSH interface seems unnecessary though.

Re: Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea

#172

Post by tucnak »

viraptor wrote: post #170
tucnak wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious, registered company wouldn't know— who is that on the receiving end of the bargain and therefore can't be held responsible for it; that's exactly the point why this technology is so beautiful and why it will ultimately prevail.

That's not how law works, you can't just look the other way. If you distribute money to random people without restrictions, records, or knowing who they are, that's called money laundering. That's what crypto tumblers are.

Good luck bringing an open source DAO to court :-)

Re: Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea

#173

Post by hrbf »

techknowlogick wrote: post #148
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…

Please don’t introduce any element of cryptocurrency or blockchain to the project. Nothing it offers will solve any real problem that a simple database couldn’t do more efficiently. No matter how you turn the worm, ”crypto” is a grift. Enough incidences have shown that even small bugs or unintended omissions in the implementation can lead to hostile manipulation and theft. Mitigating the risk of catastrophic failure, once you remove the money from the process, it makes even less sense.

What you need is humans in the decision-making process, not algorithms.

Re: Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea

#174

Post by dachary »

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…

All you found was essentially me guessing from weak signals with no confirmation. As for my financial interest in Gitea ... I was never involved with the newly formed company. If you mean that I raised over 100,000€ for the benefit of the Gitea project in the past year, this is a different matter. You can read about it at https://discourse.gitea.io/t/nlnet-grant-for-federation-conc...

Re: Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea

#175

Post by dachary »

techknowlogick wrote: post #133

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 crypto…

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.

Re: Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea

#176

Post by viraptor »

tucnak wrote: post #172
viraptor wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how law works, you can't just look the other way. If you distribute money to random people without restrictions, records, or knowing who they are, that's called money laundering. That's what crypto tumblers are.

Good luck bringing an open source DAO to court :-)

Setting up a dao doesn't magically cut you off from any legal liability. See https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2022/05/putati... and https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2022/10/cftc-s...

The fun part is: "CFTC’s order first finds that virtual currencies traded on the bZx Protocol, including ETH and DAI, are “commodities” under the CEA.", which is close to "It's cute you set up your daos and automated protocols, but legally that's irrelevant."

Regarding ignoring the identity: "The order further finds that the Ooki DAO failed to adopt a customer identification program, in violation of the Bank Secrecy Act and the Commission regulations promulgated thereunder."

Re: Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea

#177

Post by bruce511 »

sangnoir wrote: post #124
bruce511 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not wanting to insult you here, so please read in that light. I'm not trying to be the dick here. >> The problem Problem to whom? Not the customer (the one paying the bills), not the developer (the one getting paid) but by "the rest" - the ones consuming but not contributing. >> closed source Unfortunately the term "open source" encompasses a group of freedoms - the lack of any of them leads us to the term "close…

> ...but by "the rest" - the ones consuming but not contributing. "contributing", when it relates to F/LOSS software, includes non-monetary activities, which you seem to be ignoring. Nevermind the fact that the so-called consumers are the whole reason why Gitea is in the position it is today. Without adoption, it would be a bunch of people making commits on an unknown codebase. Characterizing users as moochers is bad…

>> includes non-monetary activities, which you seem to be ignoring.

sure. Except those non-monetary activities don't pay the bills. I suppose I kinda fell like they have value, but on the other hand the business has to pay bills and salaries first. If that isn't done then the non-monetary value is, well, meaningless.

And of course, if there are specific users who are contributing materially with code etc then nothing stops them from getting a gratis enterprise license.

I think it's also worth noting that the "community" consists of two groups - those that are contributing to the project, and, well (your word) the moochers. Yes, even quiet users have some "value" - but it's really tiny. The ones that are contributing code and so on, obviously they have real value.

I certainly don't want to minimise the value of active contributers, but at the same time I don't want to over-value the contribution of "n anonymous users". Yes, there's a business model built on acquiring some huge number of users, then selling them on to some big corporate (like GitHub did), but I'm no sure that's in play here.

>> Nevermind the fact that the so-called consumers are the whole reason why Gitea is in the position it is today.

I'm not sure they are so-called - they clearly are consumers. And that's great for a small fledgling company starting out. But there comes a point where the bottom line has to be fed, and they aren't the ones doing the feeding.

This is obviously not a new thing that Gitea invented, we've all seen this play out a million times with startups. It's all free all the time until the money runs out. Then something has to change to make it sustainable.

>> The other side of the libre software coin is that the users have the right to fork the project and take it in a community-driven, non-profit direction if they want to.

Of course yes. If there are some group of developers who want to work on features, they are of course most welcome to do so. That is quite literally the whole point of an Open Source license. But you say this like it's a bad thing? Like it would somehow hurt Gitea if this happened. I'm not sure that's the case. (you'd just have a new set of developers with the same financial problems, and Gitea would have gobbled up some Enterprise mind-share in the meantime.)

Re: Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea

#178

Post by Aachen »

int_19h wrote: post #164
Aachen wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In US, if you have no credit score or a poor credit score, you can still get a credit card by making a collateral deposit with the bank (usually they expect it to be 2x your expected credit limit). And transferring money to random bank accounts outside of the country is rather messy in US. Some banks won't even let you do it online.

Interesting, I didn't know that was a thing. I offered this when I couldn't get a credit card, but no dice. Didn't know this was a common solution elsewhere. I figured they didn't want to deal with custom solutions for uncommon cases like foreigners with no credit score wanting a debit card that has a credit number (essentially, that number is all I want, I don't need a loan/credit at all). Maybe it's not a thing here because a credit card is not as common or necessary.

Re: Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea

#179

Post by Aachen »

Semaphor wrote: post #165
Aachen wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ho…

> As of May 2020, 77 countries were using the IBAN numbering system -- IBAN Wikipedia [0] It’s not that widespread. For international payments, you can do international bank transfers which have fees associated with them which can be shared or put on one side of the transaction only. It’s often easier and cheaper to use a 3rd-party provider like XE or TransferWise. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Ban…

Amazes me that there is no standardized way to do money transfers between big countries that we very commonly buy/sell stuff from/to like the USA, China, etc. Thanks for the info and link!

Re: Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea

#180

Post by tucnak »

viraptor wrote: post #176
tucnak wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck bringing an open source DAO to court :-)

Setting up a dao doesn't magically cut you off from any legal liability. See https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2022/05/putati... and https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2022/10/cftc-s... The fun part is: "CFTC’s order first finds that virtual currencies traded on the bZx Protocol, including ETH and DAI, are “commodities” under the CEA.", which is close to "It's cute you set up your daos and auto…

So they settled, interesting! Sad it didn't go to court, could have made a curious precedent. This is different, however (although I haven't done much legal work in this space) as it's an investment open source DAO can be structured in a way that does not have clear beneficiary structure and as long as the primary software developer can show that they can't exert ultimate control of the network, it's all for nil. (Now that's a whole different kettle of fish!) You have things like GNU Taler potentially being able to map the existing irl ownership structures quite closely, and all kinds of ZKP, Shamir-based stuff on the end of the spectrum where it all breaks down. I allude to the latter, which would make sense (technically using a mixer would constitute money laundering in the spirit of the law but we don't see people get charged with it, never. And doing so would set a disturbing precedent. If you're starting with some primary shareholder, you're probably doing DAO wrong, and it then becomes less decentralised and more like crypto cosplay on the prior structure.
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