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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

#181

Post by dividedbyzero »

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…

Credit card would also be a big issue for German users, even in tech. I know a bunch of people who don't have one, as they aren't accepted in most places within Germany anyway, no idea how they make it work when travelling though. I guess for German users Paypal would be best, that seems to be the most widespread solution.

Re: Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea

#182

Post by throwaccount12 »

dachary wrote: post #174
throwaccount12 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Interesting that you forgot to mention the company YOU started to sell Gitea, even after multiple opportunities to mention it. I also checked the maintainer list, you have mentioned democracy many times in this thread, but yet you have not voted, nor maintain gitea.

By not mentioning this major conflict brings your motives into suspicion.

Re: Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea

#183

Post by sangnoir »

bruce511 wrote: post #177
sangnoir wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...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…

> Except those non-monetary activities don't pay the bills.

That is why the vast majority of free or open source projects are not businesses.

> 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.

This is one way to kill an open source project that is new to me!

> I'm not sure they are so-called - they clearly are consumers

They do more than that (in a power-law way): the evangelize, translate docs, file bug reports, donate, provide free support online, among other activities. Reducing a community to mere consumers is self-defeating.

> 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.

Ah, I see we have a fundamental philosophical difference. I don't believe that all open source projects have to be profitable enterprises - or even a full-time job for single maintainer. A lot - I dare say most - successful projects are volunteer-driven.

Re: Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea

#184

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea

#185

Post by bioemerl »

vbezhenar wrote: post #65
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

Recently I researched a little bit about this Gogs and Gitea situation. Here's what I've got: Gogs is maintained by a single person. He was reluctant to accept external contributions, so Gitea was forked. Now Gitea is very active with lots of contributors and more features, but Gogs is still maintained and does have many necessary features. We were migrating from GitLab, so I considered to install Gogs, we decided to…

What inspired you to migrate away from GitLab?

Re: Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea

#186

Post by barnabee »

bruce511 wrote: post #106
barnabee wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is when any of the features the enterprise wants to / can buy is closed source and not available on the same terms as the rest of the project.

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…

> Problem to whom?

The world, in my opinion (we all are being opinionated rather than right or wrong, here).

Like [almost?] everyone, I have ideas about what I think would constitute a better world. They include, within the realm of IT, a pretty much "IP" and DRM free society, open general purpose computing for all, and more truly free [as in freedom] and open source software.

I think that open core and enterprise service based models and their ilk make that world less likely. I'm not interested in finding ways to make more "silicon valley" companies profitable if they do so by making a world I don't like.

Re: Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea

#187

Post by MaxBarraclough »

throwaccount12 wrote: post #153
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 accou…

AGPL has a bad reputation because it has been weaponized against the community from companies like Elastic.

They moved from the Apache Licence 2.0 to a non-Free licence, I don't think they ever used the AGPL.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticsearch#Licensing_change...

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