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Open letter to Gitea

gitea-open-letter.coding.social

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Re: Open letter to Gitea

#121

Post by kdumont »

Beltalowda wrote: post #119
kdumont wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pe…

True, there are definitely better and more consistent developers than me on the project. However, that's the term the gitea project uses. I should've linked to the maintainers list: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/blob/main/MAINTAINERS

Re: Open letter to Gitea

#122

Post by dachary »

DandyDev wrote: post #6

Gitea was a fork of Gogs. I'm assuming we'll see a fork of Gitea now?

This is a possibility if diplomacy fails. But diplomacy and dialog should happen first. Going public and publishing this open letter is a sign that other forms of diplomacy did not work (including private messages).

Although people secretly created the company month ago, the first public hint of its existence showed when someone inadvertently mentioned being bound by an NDA. Which raised questions that they could not answer... because they were bound by an NDA.

That was in July 2022.

Re: Open letter to Gitea

#123

Post by Beltalowda »

Liquix wrote: post #100
KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #32

Am I right in assuming that though lots of work has happened in gitea since the fork, at least half of the code there was still written by the guy behind gogs? They're just going to form a for-profit based on his work and cut him out entirely?

It's MIT licensed, so anyone can incorporate based on the original author's work and turn a profit. He is not owed anything. This is an eventuality you are implicitly accepting when choosing MIT over GPL.

GPL or MIT doesn't really matter all that much here; the only difference is that with the GPL I'd have release all the source. There is nothing in the GPL stopping me from starting a Compiler Inc.™ SaaS based on gcc that "compiles code as a service".

Re: Open letter to Gitea

#124

Post by dachary »

kdumont wrote: post #93

As 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…

There only are three demands:

> A non-profit organisation owned by the Gitea community is created.

> The Gitea trademark and domains are transferred to the non-profit.

> The name of the company is changed to avoid any confusion with the non-profit.

A week ago the Gitea project was an informal community trusting elected individuals with essential assets such as the domains and the trademark. They had a clear moral bound (see https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#...) to pass on the ownership of the project to their successor.

But they thought it was ok to create a company and take the domains and trademark as if they were their property. Maybe the absence of a legal bound made them forget their promise, their moral obligation towards the Gitea community.

Creating a non-profit will avoid that kind of problem in the future and give back the domains and the trademark to the Gitea community. If the president of a non-profit was to transfer the domain name to a for-profit company they exclusively control, the members of the non profit will be in a position to sue the president for embezzlement.

If the for profit company refuses to give back the domains and trademark, that would be very damaging to the project. The post from Harald Welte on that topic in the Gitea forum is enlightening in that regard, see https://discourse.gitea.io/t/open-source-sustainment-and-the...

The other points you cite from the Open Letter are merely suggestions for future improvements (as stated in the letter), not demands.

Re: Open letter to Gitea

#125

Post by KaoruAoiShiho »

Liquix wrote: post #100
KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #32

Am I right in assuming that though lots of work has happened in gitea since the fork, at least half of the code there was still written by the guy behind gogs? They're just going to form a for-profit based on his work and cut him out entirely?

It's MIT licensed, so anyone can incorporate based on the original author's work and turn a profit. He is not owed anything. This is an eventuality you are implicitly accepting when choosing MIT over GPL.

Of course they're legally allowed to do so, it's just a question of does it make sense vis-a-vis their stated values about community and rewarding the people who has worked on the project.

Re: Open letter to Gitea

#126

Post by rapnie »

bastardoperator wrote: post #84

I find it odd that gitea uses github.

The project is quite large and cannot be easily migrated without loss of data, due to rate limits in Github's API's. The preparation has been long going, but they are nearing a point where they move the project to a gitea server. That's vendor lock-in, right there.

Re: Open letter to Gitea

#127

Post by KaoruAoiShiho »

mistrial9 wrote: post #73
didip wrote: post #49

The most distasteful part about Gitea incorporating is that the overwhelming majority of the code is written by Joe Chen (unknwon) the creator of Gogs (which is where Gitea is forked from). Is Joe part of the incorporated company? Folks who are not happy about this should just switch back to Gogs.

my uninformed opinion is that the original effort was largely done inside the Great Firewall of China, but the code really was open so it went elsewhere over time. Famously Github itself (which was copied identically here) was purchased by an aggressive partisan, and inside China are numerous clones of Github (to the extent they could pull it off). As a WEIRD myself, I am heavily invested in the social concepts aroun…

The original is https://github.com/gogs/gogs, which is an active MIT project with 10k more stars than gitea, there's nothing inscrutable about it.

Re: Open letter to Gitea

#128

Post by Anunayj »

masklinn wrote: post #89
LegitShady wrote: post #23

Earlier 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…

I wonder, how does "acquiring" a open source project work? Does it mean the company acquires assets like Name, Trademark, Domain and such? Since the code itself is open source. (Sure you might be able to get rights to the owner's code)

And even after that won't the company itself have to start putting telemetry and stuff themselves since prexisting maintainers definately won't do that. It feels pretty much like a Hostile takeover than acquiring. How do they even benefit from it

Re: Open letter to Gitea

#129

Post by mmu_man »

thrown_22 wrote: post #83
dachary wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be the case that Lunny forgot he has a moral obligation to the Gitea community that elected him year after year. Even though there is no legally binding contract. What was done is morally unacceptable. But that can be easily fixed. Just give it all back!

It could be have been solved even more simply by making it a legal obligation. Drama like this is God's way of teaching hippies why we have contract law.

I don't see why this wouldn't already be legally binding. He was elected, but he accepted the mandate which is described by this document.
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