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I find it very interesting how the person who put together this open letter has a company they started to sell Gitea, and is not even a maintainer of Gitea. So he hasn't even voted. Seems like a very suspicious conflict of interest that should be taken into account, and is very likely acting in bad faith.
Update: Looking at your comment history, you seem to be a 'damage control' account, created at the announcement of Gitea Ltd. I call that bad faith pur sang.
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Outsider opinion: So I think the entire doc as a first step in supposed good communication is in bad faith. Bringing this out into the public, and being on the front page of HN makes it seem like a stunt, and for pressure, not a good faith plea. I feel like a private conversation between the concerned parties should have happened first, and if it did that should have been mentioned. If that didn't work then maybe mak…
I am an outsider as well, and I researched the person who wrote this letter, and he has a company that sells Gitea and is not a maintainer. This letter is in bad faith like you said.
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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.
AFAIK he did not sign anything so no actual contract was formed
...domains and trademarks...are one of the most important assets any Free Software project has (if not the most important)... This rubs me the wrong way. Surely the discussion history, documentation, and the freaking code are more important than the name. I generally don't like open source becoming beholden to comercial interests, and I don't know enough about this story to know if that's really what is happening her…
No it’s not, because none of that is unique to an open source project. Anyone can come in and use those assets. Heck, that’s the whole point of open source. The only thing that is unique to an open source project is its reputation, and the reputation is most strongly tied with its name and trademarks.
That's not quite right: trademarks are different to copyright. Most open source licenses grant a copyright licenses, but not the trademark.
Over a decade ago there was a kerfuffle when Mozilla didn't approve of Debian's Firefox patchset and asserted that Debian couldn't use the name "Firefox" for the (still licensed for redistribution) source code Debian had. They had the rights to use, modify and redistribute the Firefox code - but not the name. For a while, the Mozilla browser was known as "IceWeasel" on Debian and Debian variants.
I highly recommend Adam Curtis' documentary "The Mayfair Set" [1], especially Part 2, detailing the lives of Jim Slater, Tiny Rowland and James Goldsmith who pioneered the hostile takeover, and the effect of acquisitions and mergers on the overall global economy. Hard to imagine that only 50 years ago this wasn't a "done thing". Today I see these same patterns play out in development and artistic communities obliviou…
Is this guy in fact the inventor of the annoying modern style of political documentary, where I have to listen to anxiety-inducing drones and the worst kind of movie-trailer voice, nonstop for an hour at least? The one used by shittiest propaganda tv channels? And for some inexplicable reason also borrowed by Youtube personalities that supposedly appeal to thinking, educated people in opposition to that propaganda tv.
I highly recommend Adam Curtis' documentary "The Mayfair Set" [1], especially Part 2, detailing the lives of Jim Slater, Tiny Rowland and James Goldsmith who pioneered the hostile takeover, and the effect of acquisitions and mergers on the overall global economy. Hard to imagine that only 50 years ago this wasn't a "done thing". Today I see these same patterns play out in development and artistic communities obliviou…
> The release of Pandora's Box (1992) marked the introduction of Curtis's distinctive presentation that uses collage to explore aspects of sociology, psychology, philosophy and political history. His style has been described as involving, "whiplash digressions, menacing atmospherics and arpeggiated scores, and the near-psychedelic compilation of archival footage", narrated by Curtis himself with "patrician economy an…
Well you're in for a real treat with "Russia:Trauma Zone" then. Curtis listened to all the bleating criticisms and delivered six hours of absolutely bare footage, which juxtaposed and sequenced speaks for itself. The result is even more powerful than ever before - which shows that incorporating criticism, even when it's only about surface style, pays off.
The only criticism I have is that the title is a bit bland.
It should gave been called "Natasha's Boots". She is the star of the show. And in the ened she gets her boots.
> that propaganda tv
All TV and social media is propaganda. Even cat videos. It propagates. It carries a message. Even if the message is "Don't think".
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> The release of Pandora's Box (1992) marked the introduction of Curtis's distinctive presentation that uses collage to explore aspects of sociology, psychology, philosophy and political history. His style has been described as involving, "whiplash digressions, menacing atmospherics and arpeggiated scores, and the near-psychedelic compilation of archival footage", narrated by Curtis himself with "patrician economy an…
> annoying modern style of political documentary, where I have to > listen to anxiety-inducing drones and the worst kind of > movie-trailer voice, nonstop for an hour least? Well you're in for a real treat with "Russia:Trauma Zone" then. Curtis listened to all the bleating criticisms and delivered six hours of absolutely bare footage, which juxtaposed and sequenced speaks for itself. The result is even more powerful…
There's such thing as respect for the viewer. Idk about Curtis, but the grossly manipulative style of popular political documentaries doesn't show that respect. I also don't think it's about the ‘surface’ when it's designed to tug at the emotions every second of the film.
P.S.: looked through the filmography, turns out Curtis is the author of ‘HyperNormalisation’. At least based on that I'm gonna say he does use style close-ish to what I described above: perhaps less drones, more hyperactive editing. Can't remember what the narration was like in that film, but I wasn't impressed in any positive way.
What'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…
… it’ll be top late for anyone to do anything about it?
If you’re not trying to capitalize on the community project then simply follow the demands. Put the name and domain in a non-profit and run your company on the side. If your insentives turn out to misallign, or your CEO decides to sell the company to Microsoft just to have the en shut everything down, the community loses nothing except of the current model you’ve proposed where they lose pretty much everything because your plan was just “trust us bros”.
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> the fact is that the work is done by few, and those few have decided to exercise their rights in open source to do what is their prerogative. There's a whole bunch of contributors to this project, who've never been informed. Even maintainers were caught by surprise as only some marginal bits of info were apparently spread. A project creating CONTRIBUTING guidelines, then Owners not honoring them? Effectively just p…
What contributing guidelines were not honored?
The current holder of the domains and trademarks was elected as the custodian for a limited time (through the end of 2022). The terms of that election included an agreement to hand over custody to their eventual elected successor. But they've instead created this for-profit company and transferred it ownership of the assets.
What happens when a new custodian is elected by the community who is not affiliated with this new company? Will the company give up control of the assets as previously agreed?
...domains and trademarks...are one of the most important assets any Free Software project has (if not the most important)... This rubs me the wrong way. Surely the discussion history, documentation, and the freaking code are more important than the name. I generally don't like open source becoming beholden to comercial interests, and I don't know enough about this story to know if that's really what is happening her…
On the other hand... OpenOffice vs. LibreOffice. Clearly the name was immensely valuable in that case.
I quickly accepted LibreOffice as "the new OpenOffice". It happens all the time, MariaDB is the new MySQL, uBlock Origin is the new uBlock, etc...
I expect that if Gitea messes up, the community will quickly fork and the fork will overcome the original. And considering the scope of the tool. For people who install and manage Gitea instances, keeping up to date with the tech world is often part of their job, so I don't expect a name change to be such a big deal. Gitea users are typically developers, which I hope are tech savvy enough not to be thrown off by a change in logo (assuming the instance is not rebranded).