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this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2023
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I'll try to summarize:
Thanks for explaining it, because it's a long and complex story I didn't want to type ๐
Also, probably the most touching point is how this happened. Gitea was a community project, and they were electing a leader every year or so, and giving them all the passwords (and it seems like the rights for the project, although it's not stated anywhere) This "out-of-nowhere" company is just one the temporary presidents that hijacked all the domains, repos, etc. Registered a for-profit company and transfered everything there
The community itself wrote an open letter wanting explanations And at the end they forked gitea into forgejo
That's a very selective truth way of telling the story. While what you wrote is technically correct, the "temporary president" in question is one of the founders and has been reelected for the position every time. He also did it together with some other core contributors, so while I agree that this was communicated incredibly poorly with the wider community, this wasn't a hostile takeover at all.
I consider it a hostile takeover because the majority of the community was betrayed by their actions, and they switched from a democratic to a fascist governance model
It was absolutely a hostile takeover. And now the copyright thing. It's obvious what they want to do with the former community project.
Fortunately the awesome Forgejo fork exists.
I think you first need to define "community". The majority of the code contributors seems to have been actually fine with this change and continue to contribute to Gitea. Only a minority moved to Forgejo.
Personally, I also prefer Forgejo because I share their concerns about the future of Gitea owned by a for profit entity, but let's not invent a false history here.
I've seen my fair share of projects where one of the main contributors/founders took the project commercial. It's never smooth. There will always be a part of the community that feels that open source principles are being bent or trampled.
This a good point, the story i'm telling came from the open letter, and at that point only one guy was considered responsible, and a lot of people signed the letter
But I really consider it a serious takeover, there was a democracy, and then some of the people used their power to turn it into authoritarianism
edit: anyway, I really appreciate your point of view, and just wish everything in the world would be foss and nonprofit and hugs and kisses ๐
Thank you!
TIL