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Gitea blocks PR from community, charging $$ for open-source contributions

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Re: Gitea blocks PR from community, charging $$ for open-source contributions

#41

Post by evanelias »

Buttons840 wrote: post #13

The controversy here is described in the following comment: > 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. > This is a cynical take, but I have raised these concerns in private channel…

The person who made that comment appears to be CTO of a company whose product is a (seemingly closed-source?) fork of Gitea [1].

I mean obviously that's fine legally, it's MIT licensed, and also his company contributes code to Gitea. But, it seems rather hypocritical to complain about the maintainers of Gitea having a private Enterprise repo for profit, when the person complaining does the exact same thing.

[1] "AllSpice Hub is based on a fork of Gitea, so you get all the power and functionality of Gitea, but with the hardware specific features that let you see schematic changes instead of binary blobs." https://allspice.io/post/which-git-clients-work-for-hardware...

Re: Gitea blocks PR from community, charging $$ for open-source contributions

#42

Post by tempfile »

Buttons840 wrote: post #22

I wonder what the legality of saying "this PR is available under the MIT license upon being merged into this repo" would be. A PR is copyrighted, and I guess it's just implied that a PR is available under the same license as the main repository, but an explicit PR license could override this (maybe?, IANAL). I suppose they could merge it, copy it under the MIT license, and then remove it, which overall seems kind of…

GitHub's TOS include a clause that says you agree your PRs are under the same license as the project ("license in = license out"). I don't know what happens if you assert a specific license that contradicts that. It would be bad to do what you say, because if the PR is never merged, then third parties could never use the PR in forks. A better alternative would be to offer the patch under MIT or GPL at the maintainer's discretion, but that would create more confusion than it's worth.

After all, nobody is currently prevented from maintaining Gitea with the linked PR merged. The problem is that the major community maintainer is prevented from merging it due to a conflict of interest. License juggling won't help with that.

Your proposed "trick" does not seem to achieve anything - the code is still not present in the main ditribution, no?

Re: Gitea blocks PR from community, charging $$ for open-source contributions

#43

Post by tempfile »

andrewflnr wrote: post #5

So the evidence here is that the Gitea Enterprise page now advertises an audit feature? Mainly for thoroughness: how sure are we that it's the same code?

The quoted comment does say

> Unfortunately, they have already merged a version of this code into the private gitea repo and are charging $$ for it.

So if they can be trusted at face value, "a version of this code" means it's the same code, and would be an incorrect way of describing "an analogous feature with an unrelated implementation". But they could be making a mistake, of course.

Re: Gitea blocks PR from community, charging $$ for open-source contributions

#44

Post by bogwog »

lolinder wrote: post #38
bogwog wrote: post #36

Why would someone be motivated to contribute free code to Gitea after everything? Is "forgejo" really so stupid a name that people are willing to risk being exploited by Gitea?

I'm still very much on the fence about Forgejo. I use it, but I don't trust the maintainers after seeing how they handled dissent in appointment of a moderator, and I wouldn't invest time in contributing to it directly at this stage. I added more details here for the curious: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41489578

That kind of stuff is unavoidable with orgs like this (though tbf I've seen it more with European orgs...). Anywhere there's a group of people, there's a smaller group of people who are power hungry psychopaths.

Considering the supposed evidence was deleted, I'm not just going to take your word for it (next time, use archive.org or similar). But either way, I don't care. The software works very well for me, and stroking an egomaniac or two's ego is a small price to pay for that.

Re: Gitea blocks PR from community, charging $$ for open-source contributions

#45

Post by ironmagma »

irskep wrote: post #21

The title is sensationalized. I read the whole thread. Gitea doesn't seem to be "blocking" the PR. They aren't preventing it from going in a release. However, they did pull the in-progress PR into their private repo early, presumably in order to make more money. Not great, but not bad faith. "Blocking" would suggest to me that the PR is rejected but still ends up in the closed-source codebase, which isn't the case at…

Brigading? Well I definitely didn’t intend that, although I also don’t see anyone from here having commented on the thread so I don’t see how that is reality.

Stall may have been a better word, although this PR has been crawling along for over a year now, with little response from the maintainers. If something is neglected for long enough it’s topologically equivalent to blocking it.

Re: Gitea blocks PR from community, charging $$ for open-source contributions

#46

Post by bogwog »

WolfeReader wrote: post #20
rjzzleep wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That patch doesn't exist in forgejo though does it? (I find it to be a terrible name by the way)

Forgejo is a word from a non-English language (Esperanto). It's pronounced "for-jay-o" which I find pretty easy to say.

A non-English, fake language invented in the late 19th century.

Re: Gitea blocks PR from community, charging $$ for open-source contributions

#47

Post by tempfile »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #9

So? Why does a business have an obligation to give away their intellectual property for free? When you submit a PR to a business’s intellectual property, it’s still theirs. The years go by and the beggar attitude of open source users gets more and more tiring.

It's hard to distinguish this comment from a troll response. But just to deal with the factual claim:

> When you submit a PR to a business’s intellectual property, it’s still theirs.

Nope, contributions do not "belong" to the receiving project unless explicitly agreed so. They were created under a license, and are (usually) reciprocally licensed to the project. The owner is and always was the contributor.

To call someone a beggar for asking for their code back is beyond belief.

Re: Gitea blocks PR from community, charging $$ for open-source contributions

#48

Post by WolfeReader »

bogwog wrote: post #46
WolfeReader wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgejo is a word from a non-English language (Esperanto). It's pronounced "for-jay-o" which I find pretty easy to say.

A non-English, fake language invented in the late 19th century.

How is it fake? You are right that it was invented in the 19th century and is not English.

Re: Gitea blocks PR from community, charging $$ for open-source contributions

#49

Post by ironmagma »

rjzzleep wrote: post #7
ironmagma wrote: post #2

In the link is a comment describing how Gitea LTD is stalling on a pull request and instead merged it into their private repo which they charge money for. This is a PR that was funded with a bounty with the idea of contributing to open source. Now is a great time to switch to Forgejo :-)

That patch doesn't exist in forgejo though does it? (I find it to be a terrible name by the way)

There’s nothing preventing it from being dual-contributed.

I agree the name isn’t great. Very awkward to pronounce using English phonetics.

But anecdotally, I have seen a lot less red tape contributing there and a lot less bickering than on Gitea, which is perhaps too big for its britches. Just a lot of discussion and very hard to get things done on the Gitea side.

Re: Gitea blocks PR from community, charging $$ for open-source contributions

#50

Post by tempfile »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #35
collingreen wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reads like "eat your dinner; there are starving kids in " which hints at a valid point but even the toddlers know isn't a good argument. Calling people greedy solely because "it could be worse" is rude and misanthropic. Calling them greedy for wanting a bounty-funded, community contribution to be merged into the community version not just the paywall version is ridiculous to me. Maybe the "shocking revelation" a…

My rant was in general, not against this specific issue, just as I believe the OP's post is. Yeah, taking advantage of volunteer work, not a great thing even if legal. On the other hand, the unsympathetic side of me says, "That's the license; those are the rules of the game which everyone voluntarily agreed to; and you don't have to like how some people play the game." There's no place in FOSS licenses for "Rule #7:…

> My rant was general, not against this specific issue

Sure, and the comment you're replying to also explained the error in your argument in general. Being privileged and exploited are not mutually exclusive. "those are the rules of the game" is not very far from saying "everything that is possible is fair". It's the logic of a bully.

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