Gitea Blog

Background story seems to be that a portion of Gitea maintainers formed a for-profit company, and transferred all the trademarks to it, going against former promises made, and blowing up their own community as a consequence. They go over the now-traditional "companies are using our free software without paying us" discourse here: https://blog.gitea.io/2022/10/open-source-sustainment-and-the-future-of-gitea/

> we’re planning on establishing a fund to be able to provide support to contributors who not only contribute features, but also bug fixes, performance enhancements, and important refactors.

Sounds like any other for-profit company building commercial software. What stopped them from doing that while keeping the original OSS software copyrights intact?

Also curious to see their plan to pay out all the developers working on the OSS that underpins Gitea itself. The list is pretty long.

The Gitea team is full of crypto shillers.

https://blog.gitea.io/2022/10/a-message-from-lunny-on-gitea-ltd.-and-the-gitea-project/

Their founder claims to have invented Gogs (he was one of the early committers) when the original author is another engineer

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitea

> Gitea was created by Lunny Xiao, who was also a founder of the self-hosted Git service Gogs.

https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/three-years-at-sourcegraph

> About the author
Joe Chen is Software Engineer and maintainer of the open source project Gogs, a painless self-hosted Git service. You can chat with Joe on Twitter @jc_unknwon or our community Discord

A takeover was announced a week ago (https://blog.gitea.io/2022/10/open-source-sustainment-and-the-future-of-gitea/ ; discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33339421). This got a negative response by the community (https://gitea-open-letter.coding.social/ ; discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33372471) but the owners disregarded them (https://blog.gitea.io/2022/10/a-message-from-lunny-on-gitea-ltd.-and-the-gitea-project/ ; discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33394280). The reason behind the response being that Gitea was a community-led project with an electionary process. A fork is eminent.

Gitea is a community fork of the popular self-hosted Git service Gogs. We’re a growing group of former Gogs users and contributors who found the single-maintainer management model of Gogs frustrating and thus decided to make an effort to build a more open and faster development model.

This happened not before trying to convince @Unknwon about giving write permissions to more people, among the community. He rightly considered Gogs his own creature and didn’t want to let it grow outside of him, thus a fork was necessary in order to set that code effectively free.

source: https://blog.gitea.io/2016/12/welcome-to-gitea/

The major releases generally change quite a lot in one go, for example:

https://blog.gitea.io/2022/02/gitea-1.16.0-and-1.16.1-released/

https://blog.gitea.io/2021/08/gitea-1.15.0-is-released/

But I'm sure Github changes a lot more. However, the question is if those changes are worth the instability. For my workflow I just want my repos to be accessible, have my source, issues, and wiki accessible, and of course my basic git operations working. If that core functionality is actually not working at times, I'd definitely consider changing the git provider.

Personally I only care about GitLab because its open source with a good CI and because of Copilot.

If the supreme court says the copilot is fully legal, I would probably just revert to using Github for personal projects(their free tier is just unbeatable), i still use it more than anything else, because everything is on Github.

I am excited about Gitea Actions[1], as I feel gitea is generally only missing a decent CI system, and codeberg is growing fast.

1. https://blog.gitea.io/2022/12/feature-preview-gitea-actions/