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0 pointsbhaney7mo ago0 comments

According to Forgejo[1], Gitea underwent a secret hostile takeover by a for-profit company and has been moving from free software to "open core" bullshit. The reason that I, and I assume a lot of other people, made an effort to switch from Github to Gogs/Gitea was to evade the for-profit corpo nonfree crap. The more I'm looking into it, the more it looks like the real development is happening on Forgejo too.

[1] https://forgejo.org/compare-to-gitea/#why-was-forgejo-create...

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mappu7mo ago

A more charitable framing of the situation is: the for-profit company is because people always complained about Gitea "why is it developed on GitHub, not your own hosting" but that means money has to be involved in the cloud hosting project; it is just the same Gitea core developers it has always been, not a takeover.

The "open core" (Gitea Enterprise) is not Gitea, it is a downstream fork by CommitGo, who you can pay for contract development for custom features. The features are expected to be upstreamed, there are open PRs, they just don't yet meet Gitea's code review standards. You can run them from the PRs if you like.

monster_truck7mo ago

This sounds like a lot of work for no benefit

homebrewer7mo ago

Yeah, it's hard to take them seriously when they've been saying very nasty things about the project their whole foundation is built upon, and from where they continue to draw most of their functionality. Gitea is ahead on that despite patches flowing one way only. If you look at forgejo commits, more than half of them are merges of library updates made by the renovate bot, which artificially inflates the level of activity you see. About half of the rest are cherry-picks from the Gitea repo.

Look instead at the amount of features introduced with each version. Forgejo releases twice as often as Gitea does, so compare two releases of Forgejo with one release of Gitea made within the same time frame. I haven't been impressed so far.

Also a bit more context: https://lwn.net/Articles/963608

rowanG0777mo ago

I don't think they are saying nasty things about the project they were born out of. They are saying nasty things about the corporate takeover.

bhaneyOP7mo ago

> it's hard to take them seriously when they've been saying very nasty things about the project their whole foundation is built upon

I'm not sure why that would make them hard to take seriously unless the things they're saying are false. Is that what you're claiming?

> If you look at forgejo commits, more than half of them are merges of library updates made by the renovate bot, which artificially inflates the level of activity you see

If I thought number of commits strictly equals activity then I guess it would look like that, but I don't. From what I'm seeing, a lot of the Gitea devs left to go to Forgejo and are now working on it exclusively, while the work being done on Gitea gets selectively merged into Forgejo too. I don't actually care about that either - Gogs had all the features I wanted when I first installed it years ago and all I really want out of the maintainers is security patches. I'm mostly just concerned about licensing and ownership models that incentivize the software org to inevitably turn evil in the future.

homebrewer7mo ago

None of the really heavy hitters from the "core team" have left. As long as 100% FOSS Gitea pulls ahead in functionality, and can be downgraded relatively easily with an hour of work, I personally see no reason to move anywhere. You can part in different ways, the vibes you give off certainly matter, even when you're 100% technically correct.

And I suggested comparing releases, not commits; Gitea is ahead here both in what it supported at the moment of the hard fork, and in what has been introduced since then (counting only the MIT version).

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mappu7mo ago

monster_truck7mo ago

This sounds like a lot of work for no benefit

homebrewer7mo ago

Also a bit more context: https://lwn.net/Articles/963608

rowanG0777mo ago

I don't think they are saying nasty things about the project they were born out of. They are saying nasty things about the corporate takeover.

bhaneyOP7mo ago

> it's hard to take them seriously when they've been saying very nasty things about the project their whole foundation is built upon

I'm not sure why that would make them hard to take seriously unless the things they're saying are false. Is that what you're claiming?

> If you look at forgejo commits, more than half of them are merges of library updates made by the renovate bot, which artificially inflates the level of activity you see

homebrewer7mo ago

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