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Open letter to Gitea

gitea-open-letter.coding.social

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Re: Open letter to Gitea

#71

Post by shkkmo »

aliqot wrote: post #20
rapnie wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a multi-step process. First you do the right thing and kindly ask to repair trust that has been breached. If that doesn't work, which is a likely outcome, discussion about forks are in order. "Just fork it" is easy to say, but with large projects require careful consideration. There's too many people saying "just fork it" all too casually, if you ask me.

> First you do the right thing and kindly ask to repair trust that has been breached Gitea is a self-labeled "DoOcracy". nobody owes an apology. forking is inherent to open source methodology. ideological conflicts help nobody but those who lead them. 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.

Forking is inherent to open source methodology, however many open source projects depend on a community of contributors and users to maintain the project, fund it, and push it forward.

While a simple personal fork of a repository/codebase is not very aggressive, forking a community (or attempting to) is a pretty significant step that will almost always create drama and bad feelings.

Working to communicate and resolve issues before attempting a fork of the community is always a good idea since they should be avoided when possible.

While the owners of an open source project absolutely have the legal rights to do as they wish, if those owners are interested in maintaining a community around their project, it behooves them to listen to that community, especially to those who have put their own time and effort into that project and community.

Re: Open letter to Gitea

#72

Post by rapnie »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #36

...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…

> I generally don't like open source becoming beholden to comercial interests

Yes, but there's the crux. Gitea Ltd having the domains and trademark and then setting project direction means exactly that. While before it appeared or pretended to be a fully community-driven exercise. If you are not part of the company, how can you still considered to be a community-elected Owner that acts as the project's custodian?

Re: Open letter to Gitea

#73

Post by mistrial9 »

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 around F/OSS and GPL, and have super hard time with the vibe coming from PRC. Those implications are beyond the scope of this topic though, for the most part. better info welcome

Re: Open letter to Gitea

#74

Post by cowmix »

aliqot wrote: post #28
dboreham wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dispute here isn't about the code. It's about the domain name and trademark.

Quoted post unavailable.

I use gitea and I do some proselytizing for it.

I do care if many people who are "doing" for an OS project are not informed with or have a choice in regards to the "brand" of the project. Sure, we can all fork this project (which started out as a fork) but it would be nice of people played nice and so we can all stay with the current fork we love.

Having said all this, I need to read up on this because this might be a nothing burger. My comments are, in general, my expectations of how OS projects should work.

Re: Open letter to Gitea

#75

Post by coding123 »

yamtaddle wrote: post #38
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #36

...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.

Hudson and Jenkins too

https://medium.com/swlh/hudson-is-retiring-the-end-of-a-jenk...

Re: Open letter to Gitea

#76

Post by sjcoles »

lovich wrote: post #44

I’ve never participated in an open source community so this is the view of an ignorant third party. Everytime I see anything related to the open source world bubble up into the public I am only reminded of high school and college level social drama. It seems utterly exhausting to be involved

> Everytime I see anything related to the open source world bubble up into the public I am only reminded of high school and college level social drama.

This is engineering/technical communities in general. You get a lot of strong opinions and individuals who cannot take criticism. A few, often very loud, people make a ton of noise and take up the time of the individuals actually contributing real substance to the project.

Don't like it? Fork it. Simple as that. Same with all the code of conduct nonsense that crops up a couple times a year.

If your opinions are so popular forking and moving contributors to a new project should be easy right? Yeah, turns out your opinions aren't shared by most and only the loudest of the group, no one else really cares.

Re: Open letter to Gitea

#77

Post by rhaway84773 »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #36

...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.

Re: Open letter to Gitea

#78

Post by kdumont »

tinalumfoil wrote: post #3

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 maintainers on the "Open Letter" is that it's an overreaction. It's not supported by a vast majority of the maintainers of the project and spearheaded by folks who have contributed very little. A VAST majority of folks contributing to gitea are still onboard.

We need answers. The communication was poorly handled.

The original announcement was completely bereft of details and now we finally have a draft of updated clarifications that should be posted soon (thankfully, this time we're being consulted for feedback).

I think the original intention was "we're seeing some revenue coming in and now we're workshopping ways to get those funds back to contributors and maintain the project in a sustainable way", but a lot of poorly-chosen words were used, and panic ensued.

TL;DR: give us some time to set it all straight and if it really looks like incentives are misaligned, please provide some constructive criticism.

ALSO, WE WOULD LOVE HELP & FEEDBACK FROM FOLKS WHO HAVE MAINTAINED SIMILAR PROJECTS SUCCESSFULLY

[0] https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/graphs/contributors

Re: Open letter to Gitea

#79

Post by rileyphone »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #36

...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…

Maybe this is close to the issue with Firefox on Debian, where it was rebranded as “Iceweasel” for 10 years due to trademark dispute.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_software_rebranded_by_...

Re: Open letter to Gitea

#80

Post by shkkmo »

aliqot wrote: post #28
dboreham wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dispute here isn't about the code. It's about the domain name and trademark.

Quoted post unavailable.

The value of trademarks is far more than you are making out. That value doesn't come from "how clever the name is", but from name recognition and community reputation.

The community can fork the project and rename it. However, this comes as costs of losing name recognition/reputation and creating additional drama in the community. If the issue can be resolved amicably, it is better to avoid the need for this.

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