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Meeting notes between Forgejo and the Dutch government via Git commits

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Re: Meeting notes between Forgejo and the Dutch government via Git commits

#31

Post by Terr_ »

kouunji wrote: post #7

This is brilliant, especially if this kind of approach was adopted in policy development. Chunks of vetted “code” that is transparently shared and can be used by other governments facing similar challenges…imagine…

I really really want the US legal process to abandon a certain style of incredibly cryptic bill, which contains hundreds of "the word foo shall be inserted in between teh words"-style changes.

It often seems like a trick to make is so that nobody really knows what they're voting on, as opposed to a wholesale "replace that entire section with the readable information below". I suppose, to be charitable, it may have originated as a conflict-avoidance strategy.

Ideally, bills would be changesets that can easily be turned into before-vs-after comparisons for legislators to review and approve.

Re: Meeting notes between Forgejo and the Dutch government via Git commits

#32

Post by 0_gravitas »

bwblabs wrote: post #15
mfld wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on those meeting notes, the conflict of interest that arises when attempting to add features that compete with paid ones is real. So its that ideology that it is actually needed for a Government user/contributor.

Not sure: the government could just buy Gitea Enterprise license right? And thereby not really run true 'open source' software, but it would support the main development behind Gitea.

There's a batch of dialog that indicates an interest in 'digital sovereignty', so it sounds like they are less interested in being an explicit customer of a given company.

Re: Meeting notes between Forgejo and the Dutch government via Git commits

#33

Post by zamalek »

bwblabs wrote: post #4

Very positive to have a governmental hosted git/code platform, although I would still advise Gitea (it's not documented that pick is explored). I'm a self hosting GoGogs / Gitea user for almost 10 years, I did follow the Gitea fork. However regarding the Forgejo fork: the main contributors stayed with Gitea. The ideologically forked Forgejo made some license changes and hard fork decisions that increased the maintena…

> Forgejo is more busy managing ideals, than creating software.

How many Elastic Searches will it take for people to realize that this is mandatory. Linux would not be where it is today were it not for some ideals wrangling.

Re: Meeting notes between Forgejo and the Dutch government via Git commits

#34

Post by bwblabs »

ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #27
bwblabs wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct, also see the initial discussion about changing the license: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/governance/pulls/24#issuecommen... The issue with deviating from the upstream license is that only the code author can upstream a patch, since GPLv3 cannot be changed by a non-author of the code to MIT. Resulting in less being patched upstream, and so more merge conflicts, the maintenance burden I was talking about.

> Forgejo is more busy managing ideals, than creating software. But managing ideals is far more important than creating software. Software is just a tool. It's a mean to an end, it's not the end in itself. If software improves humanity we should create it. If not, we shouldn't. We shouldn't create software just because. We can, but that's not ethical. And regarding your comments that "the original contributors stayed…

Not sure why you misquoted, I said "the main contributors stayed with Gitea", also see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45929247#45931139

When deciding which software fork to pick, it is about the development power. Also note my point about security: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45929247#45930310

Re: Meeting notes between Forgejo and the Dutch government via Git commits

#35

Post by bwblabs »

zamalek wrote: post #33
bwblabs wrote: post #4

Very positive to have a governmental hosted git/code platform, although I would still advise Gitea (it's not documented that pick is explored). I'm a self hosting GoGogs / Gitea user for almost 10 years, I did follow the Gitea fork. However regarding the Forgejo fork: the main contributors stayed with Gitea. The ideologically forked Forgejo made some license changes and hard fork decisions that increased the maintena…

> Forgejo is more busy managing ideals, than creating software. How many Elastic Searches will it take for people to realize that this is mandatory. Linux would not be where it is today were it not for some ideals wrangling.

It really depends, e.g. take a look at PostgreSQL, which is licensed under the PostgreSQL License, which is similar to MIT.

IMHO a MIT license is better than AGPL with a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) like with Elastic.

Gitea is MIT, so free and open-source, permissive.

Also see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45929247#45930949

Re: Meeting notes between Forgejo and the Dutch government via Git commits

#36

Post by bwblabs »

0_gravitas wrote: post #32
bwblabs wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure: the government could just buy Gitea Enterprise license right? And thereby not really run true 'open source' software, but it would support the main development behind Gitea.

There's a batch of dialog that indicates an interest in 'digital sovereignty', so it sounds like they are less interested in being an explicit customer of a given company.

You can do that by self hosting the code.

My point was that you don't need to compete with paid features, just please give the developers money to develop the software further (and fix bugs/issues), so e.g. buy some 'enterprise license', even if you don't need it in terms of features.

Re: Meeting notes between Forgejo and the Dutch government via Git commits

#37

Post by gremlinunderway »

krick wrote: post #10
szszrk wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they rather talk to gitea? Isn't it sensible for a European government to talk to a player that is being backed by European companies and has a cleaner approach to open source? I'm not arguing, I'm asking what's the rationale here.

It appears to me that the rationale was clearly stated in GP: > resulting in missing upstream features and decreased security I.e. it's a matter of technical superiority, which, to me, how the decisions should be made. Not by having friends in the community and all of us being Europeans and so on. (But, of course, I would be glad to hear more particular details/examples of Forgejo lagging behind.)

i dont get this blindspot by lots of developers parroting this uber technocratic nonsense.

There's no such thing as some apolitical, objectively best approach to a technical problem. Instead of arguing about specific merits about specific issues people throw out this big wide handwave about how "idea X is simply technically the wrong choice", as if this is a legit position to have.

Take a philosophy course for god's sake before you engineer us all to death.

Re: Meeting notes between Forgejo and the Dutch government via Git commits

#38

Post by matrss »

bwblabs wrote: post #4

Very positive to have a governmental hosted git/code platform, although I would still advise Gitea (it's not documented that pick is explored). I'm a self hosting GoGogs / Gitea user for almost 10 years, I did follow the Gitea fork. However regarding the Forgejo fork: the main contributors stayed with Gitea. The ideologically forked Forgejo made some license changes and hard fork decisions that increased the maintena…

> The ideologically forked Forgejo made some license changes and hard fork decisions that increased the maintenance burden even more, resulting in missing upstream features and decreased security. Forgejo is more busy managing ideals, than creating software.

And from other comments:

> When deciding which software fork to pick, it is about the development power.

> In my view they don't have the development to keep up with Gitea.

How do you come to the conclusion that Gitea has more development power? Looking at the Insights / Activities overview of each repository there were slightly more authors with more contributions to Forgejo over the last month. Acknowledging that this fluctuates I'd estimate that both projects are similarly active.

Also, Forgejo is actually dogfooding its development, which is much more reassuring than what Gitea does IMO.

Re: Meeting notes between Forgejo and the Dutch government via Git commits

#39

Post by mfld »

homebrewer wrote: post #16
mfld wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on those meeting notes, the conflict of interest that arises when attempting to add features that compete with paid ones is real. So its that ideology that it is actually needed for a Government user/contributor.

To this day anything of worth that's been added to Gitea is released under MIT. Their business model is: you pay us to develop the features we need, we release them for everybody, which is how their collaboration with Blender has been working thus far. If it's good enough for Blender, who decided to stay with Gitea, it's good enough for me.

The given example is from GitLab - thanks for pointing out that Gitea follows a different OSS strategy.

Re: Meeting notes between Forgejo and the Dutch government via Git commits

#40

Post by rolandog »

matrss wrote: post #38
bwblabs wrote: post #4

Very positive to have a governmental hosted git/code platform, although I would still advise Gitea (it's not documented that pick is explored). I'm a self hosting GoGogs / Gitea user for almost 10 years, I did follow the Gitea fork. However regarding the Forgejo fork: the main contributors stayed with Gitea. The ideologically forked Forgejo made some license changes and hard fork decisions that increased the maintena…

> The ideologically forked Forgejo made some license changes and hard fork decisions that increased the maintenance burden even more, resulting in missing upstream features and decreased security. Forgejo is more busy managing ideals, than creating software. And from other comments: > When deciding which software fork to pick, it is about the development power. > In my view they don't have the development to keep up…

As I've mentioned elsewhere [0], sometimes there's just fake outrage trying to associate drama or a general feeling of disapproval with a particular project.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45597749

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