Is this yet another case of a liberal license project gone proprietary after the contributions of many developers in the community?
If so, this seems like a reminder of why the GPL and its variants are important.
Open letter to Gitea
111–120 of 152 posts
Re: Open letter to Gitea
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand... OpenOffice vs. LibreOffice. Clearly the name was immensely valuable in that case.
Sure it was immensely valuable. But imagine if the code disappeared overnight. Then LibreOffice wouldn't be were it is now.
If LibreOffice's code disappeared or was stolen overnight they could pretty quickly get it back from one of their many forks, if their trademark/domain/package names got stolen or lost it would cause lasting damage.
Re: Open letter to Gitea
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never saw a follow up to the audacity kerfuffle. Is there any follow ups to whats going on there?
There were two fork events AFAIK: - DarkAudacity, was mostly a fork by Audacity's own lead dev for experimenting on things which might be too disruptive or polarising for the main project, that ended up being largely reincorporated in Audacity - After acquiring the project, Muse Group drafted a proposal to add invasive telemetry and age restrictions, this led to a few forks and ultimately a reversal of course; soon a…
there was also some bit about a third party developer using their API to build something and they threatened to have him deported to China when he was a vocal anti CCP activist, essentially threatening him with jail/death if he didn't take down his project.
Re: Open letter to Gitea
#114Here's an explanation of DoOcracy, as linked from the open letter: https://communitywiki.org/wiki/DoOcracy (If you're like me and hadn't heard of the concept before.)
Problem with doocracy is it also doesn't care what the doer does.
"Why did you punch me in the face?"
"Shut up, it was free. I do all this work for free and you ungrateful parasite users just complain."
Re: Open letter to Gitea
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I feel like a private conversation between the concerned parties should have happened first With a dispersed community that used to work in public, against the company owners who secretly prepared this since at least March this year (likely longer) and not even informed their own maintainers properly in the private channel they have for that.
So I think saying it's all of the community is a little generous, it's like 20 people who've signed, and yes even then. A private conversation should have happened. As an outsider, that's a hearsay situation to me so forgive me if I don't outright trust the intentions of the small group of people who put out this letter, I don't know anything about them. And if the situation actually is as nefarious as you say it is,…
> So I think saying it's all of the community is a little generous
Indeed, most of the community isn't easily reached. Hence the open letter and the ability to sign. I see the open letter as an invitation to have these conversations. But this time according to community processes and in the open.
Re: Open letter to Gitea
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the step right before forking. If diplomacy fails, then you fork. A silent fork is much less likely to gain traction. This letter raises awareness for the problem and is the reaction to it is a solid foundation for a fork.
Your improvements to the code do not require 'traction'. The only thing that undoes a do-ocracy is another do-er, and that starts with a fork, like how Gitea started.
Way too much worship of this DoOcracy word on this story.
It's not as end-all-questions as a lot of people seem to think. It's the kind of thing people say who just find caring about anyone else's concerns about bad behavior annoying and wish for a way to shut them up and and also green light their own bad dehavior.
One problem with doocracy is it not only doesn't care who does something, it also doesn't care what the holy doer does.
DoOcracy is no valid excuse for being a dick.
"Why did you punch me in the face?"
"Shut up, it was free."
Re: Open letter to Gitea
#117As I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I'm a contributor to gitea and have no ownership in the new organization. I genuinely would like some clarification to the points in the letter, as I'm trying to advise the owners and understand my future with the project. It seems like the demands are: > Implementing an intuitive and fair election process. I think we do that now: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/blob/main…
> What are some examples of non-profit open-source companies? Is that typical?
The Apache foundation? FSF? The Mozilla foundation (which is different but related to the for-profit Mozilla Corporation)? The rust foundation? CNCF? Probably many others.
It would also probably be possible to find a suitable existing non-profit that could act as a steward of these resources.
Re: Open letter to Gitea
#118Here's an explanation of DoOcracy, as linked from the open letter: https://communitywiki.org/wiki/DoOcracy (If you're like me and hadn't heard of the concept before.)
In bicycle culture they do an unorganized event called critical mass; in the past I've seen these events hijacked by a "xerocracy" where someone shows up to the meeting point, starts handing out (xeroxed/photo copied) fliers with a map with a different route and then take off in that direction and.... most of the crowd follows them. Different kind of Do-ing but very effective in truly flat hierachies when executed we…
This is more common than you think when you get into alleycat races where you're racing for money.
Re: Open letter to Gitea
#119What's been the general opinion of this change to the gitea contributors? It's difficult to match usernames to real names but I don't see overlap between the top contributors and signatories. https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/pulse
Gitea contributor ("maintainer") here [0] - we were blindsided by the original Gitea Ltd. announcement too, but if you look at any of answers in discord regarding clarification, it's pretty clear that this is a better situation than the gitea assets being owned by a single person, and the intention is NOT to syphon money from the project or start a shillcoin or something like that. The general consensus from us maint…
I have no desire to poo-poo your contributions, but with 30 commits over a 2 year period and very sporadic engagement on the issue tracker, "contributor" seems completely fair but "maintainer" seems a bit much.
Maintainers are the people who are involved reasonably consistently for the long term, and also do the un-sexy work of tracking down the (sometimes difficult) bugs people report, triage the (unclear) issues people report, deal with generic support requests, and all of that.
Re: Open letter to Gitea
#120As an outsider this is not compelling. Claims aren't substantiated or given context (I would expect links to promises and explanations of how specific actors have violated them). There is also a lot of work being expected in the form of non profit companies and organizational structures and seemingly very little volunteering to do that work, which to my eye is immediately suspect. I guess I'd expect this document to…
The Gitea Open Letter has links to the two documents that have the facts you ask for, at the bottom of the page. And with links within the text. They are:
https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#... https://blog.gitea.io/2022/10/open-source-sustainment-and-th...