I highly recommend Adam Curtis' documentary "The Mayfair Set" [1],
especially Part 2, detailing the lives of Jim Slater, Tiny Rowland and
James Goldsmith who pioneered the hostile takeover, and the effect of
acquisitions and mergers on the overall global economy. Hard to
imagine that only 50 years ago this wasn't a "done thing". Today I see
these same patterns play out in development and artistic communities
oblivious to 51 percent and Sybil attacks, unaware of who is holding
what key assets, and then being surprised by takeovers and defectors.
> The release of Pandora's Box (1992) marked the introduction of Curtis's distinctive presentation that uses collage to explore aspects of sociology, psychology, philosophy and political history. His style has been described as involving, "whiplash digressions, menacing atmospherics and arpeggiated scores, and the near-psychedelic compilation of archival footage", narrated by Curtis himself with "patrician economy and assertion".
Is this guy in fact the inventor of the annoying modern style of political documentary, where I have to listen to anxiety-inducing drones and the worst kind of movie-trailer voice, nonstop for an hour at least? The one used by shittiest propaganda tv channels? And for some inexplicable reason also borrowed by Youtube personalities that supposedly appeal to thinking, educated people in opposition to that propaganda tv.
> annoying modern style of political documentary, where I have to
> listen to anxiety-inducing drones and the worst kind of
> movie-trailer voice, nonstop for an hour least?
Well you're in for a real treat with "Russia:Trauma Zone" then.
Curtis listened to all the bleating criticisms and delivered six hours
of absolutely bare footage, which juxtaposed and sequenced speaks for
itself. The result is even more powerful than ever before - which
shows that incorporating criticism, even when it's only about surface
style, pays off.
The only criticism I have is that the title is a bit bland.
It should gave been called "Natasha's Boots". She is the star of the
show. And in the ened she gets her boots.
> that propaganda tv
All TV and social media is propaganda. Even cat videos. It
propagates. It carries a message. Even if the message is "Don't
think".
> Since Gitea is a pure community organization without any company support, to keep the development healthy we will elect three owners every year.
> When the new owners have been elected, the old owners will give up ownership to the newly elected owners
According to CONTRIBUTING.md, this dates back to 2016. The new company represents a shift from the community model that attracted many developers and users.
The issue is that ultimately Lunny holds the trademark and isn't legally bound to uphold whatever agreement is stated in the repo.
It may be the case that Lunny forgot he has a moral obligation to the Gitea community that elected him year after year. Even though there is no legally binding contract.
What was done is morally unacceptable. But that can be easily fixed. Just give it all back!
As I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I'm a contributor to gitea and have no ownership in the new organization. I genuinely would like some clarification to the points in the letter, as I'm trying to advise the owners and understand my future with the project.
It seems like the demands are:
> Implementing an intuitive and fair election process.
I think we do that now: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#...
Anyone who has contributed to the gitea project more than 2x PRs is invited to be a maintainer. Every maintainer gets 3 votes.
Maybe there are some suggestions for improving - please open a PR.
> Describing the ways in which democratic decisions are to be made.
Again, I'm just confused what's being requested. Moving on.
> Providing accessible places where all relevant information can be found.
This seems like the same request as above. Or maybe a request for better documentation. I agree. Open a PR, don't fork gitea.
> Establishing a DoOcracy that works and continue to improve it.
I agree with this and I suspect that was the intention with the original reference to DAOs, but needs to be clarified.
> A non-profit organisation owned by the Gitea community is created.
> The Gitea trademark and domains are transferred to the non-profit.
> The name of the company is changed to avoid any confusion with the non-profit.
Does anyone have experience with how this is typically handled? It seems like this is the only actionable request. What are some examples of non-profit open-source companies? Is that typical?
> A non-profit organisation owned by the Gitea community is created.
> The Gitea trademark and domains are transferred to the non-profit.
> The name of the company is changed to avoid any confusion with the non-profit.
A week ago the Gitea project was an informal community trusting elected individuals with essential assets such as the domains and the trademark. They had a clear moral bound (see https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#...) to pass on the ownership of the project to their successor.
But they thought it was ok to create a company and take the domains and trademark as if they were their property. Maybe the absence of a legal bound made them forget their promise, their moral obligation towards the Gitea community.
Creating a non-profit will avoid that kind of problem in the future and give back the domains and the trademark to the Gitea community. If the president of a non-profit was to transfer the domain name to a for-profit company they exclusively control, the members of the non profit will be in a position to sue the president for embezzlement.
If the for profit company refuses to give back the domains and trademark, that would be very damaging to the project. The post from Harald Welte on that topic in the Gitea forum is enlightening in that regard, see https://discourse.gitea.io/t/open-source-sustainment-and-the...
The other points you cite from the Open Letter are merely suggestions for future improvements (as stated in the letter), not demands.
> What are some examples of non-profit open-source companies? Is that typical?
The Apache foundation? FSF? The Mozilla foundation (which is different but related to the for-profit Mozilla Corporation)? The rust foundation? CNCF? Probably many others.
It would also probably be possible to find a suitable existing non-profit that could act as a steward of these resources.
...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 here. Reading that the name may be more important than the code is just very off-putting.
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.
That's not quite right: trademarks are different to copyright. Most open source licenses grant a copyright licenses, but not the trademark.
Over a decade ago there was a kerfuffle when Mozilla didn't approve of Debian's Firefox patchset and asserted that Debian couldn't use the name "Firefox" for the (still licensed for redistribution) source code Debian had. They had the rights to use, modify and redistribute the Firefox code - but not the name. For a while, the Mozilla browser was known as "IceWeasel" on Debian and Debian variants.
I quickly accepted LibreOffice as "the new OpenOffice". It happens all the time, MariaDB is the new MySQL, uBlock Origin is the new uBlock, etc...
I expect that if Gitea messes up, the community will quickly fork and the fork will overcome the original. And considering the scope of the tool. For people who install and manage Gitea instances, keeping up to date with the tech world is often part of their job, so I don't expect a name change to be such a big deal. Gitea users are typically developers, which I hope are tech savvy enough not to be thrown off by a change in logo (assuming the instance is not rebranded).
The new name was the issue, it was too clever and close to the original. OfficeSuite or IceOffice or TerraOffice. Something about the word Libre makes it seem like the outdated copy.
> 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?
i think the point is that the code isn't really an "asset" of an open-source project, because anybody who wants to take it can have it, regardless of their affiliation with the "project".
gitea is a brand. whoever owns the domain and trademarks owns the brand.
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.
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
I have no desire to poo-poo your contributions, but with 30 commits over a 2 year period and very sporadic engagement on the issue tracker, "contributor" seems completely fair but "maintainer" seems a bit much.
Maintainers are the people who are involved reasonably consistently for the long term, and also do the un-sexy work of tracking down the (sometimes difficult) bugs people report, triage the (unclear) issues people report, deal with generic support requests, and all of that.
> It's not supported by a vast majority of the maintainers of the project and spearheaded by folks who have contributed very little.
I feel that here you demonstrate some of the improvements that can be made to the project. This stance shows that the view on what constitutes the Community around the project is quite narrow: Contribute a lot of code and you matter. Commits + LoC or be silent.
While that is a logical perspective and how many FOSS projects look upon community, it neglects all the people in different roles that have a warm heart for the project and do activities that may be less visible than that. Like taking time to advocate the project across the web wherever they can. Or those working in a broader ecosystem in other projects where you indirectly benefit. Codeberg is an example who maintain a downstream fork, and where people like Otto Richter act like delegated maintainers and handling a lot of user feedback. Or the group of projects involved in forge federation, that did the brunt work where Gitea benefits tremendously [0].
The announcement of Gitea Ltd and the follow-up with the Open Letter did a lot of good in that respect. For the first time there's broader open discussion on strategical aspects and long-term project direction where many of the community have their say. Though the open letter only gives indications of the kinds of community project improvements that can be made, these last couple of days a ton of feedback has been posted on how these could actually be shaped.
> TL;DR: give us some time to set it all straight and if it really looks like incentives are misaligned…
… it’ll be top late for anyone to do anything about it?
If you’re not trying to capitalize on the community project then simply follow the demands. Put the name and domain in a non-profit and run your company on the side. If your insentives turn out to misallign, or your CEO decides to sell the company to Microsoft just to have the en shut everything down, the community loses nothing except of the current model you’ve proposed where they lose pretty much everything because your plan was just “trust us bros”.
A few of the top contributors are the one behind the company. It is fair to assume they are perfectly ok with stealing from the community as it directly benefits them...
Copyright doesn't exist in a vacuum someone owns the copyright on the logo, it's up to them to determine who they want to transfer / license that to. Trademark will be up to the USPTO and other jurisdictional bodies to determine who has the right to use it to minimize confusion to consumers.
The people doing all the work are "stealing" from the "community" that contributes much less? If someone wants to fork here, it seems like they would also need to step up the amount of contributions they're doing if the people currently doing the work are the ones organizing a way to make some money to pay for their time.
I'm a user of gitea and sympathetic to this open letter but it doesn't mean much without significant contributors signing on, and being marked as such. I assume the Gogs developer isn't happy about this but I don't see his name either. Right now it's unclear the connection of the signees to the Gitea project.
In bicycle culture they do an unorganized event called critical mass; in the past I've seen these events hijacked by a "xerocracy" where someone shows up to the meeting point, starts handing out (xeroxed/photo copied) fliers with a map with a different route and then take off in that direction and.... most of the crowd follows them. Different kind of Do-ing but very effective in truly flat hierachies when executed well.
That was very interesting, might make a good submission on its own. I really enjoyed what seemed like an attempt at a neutral description without proselytization.
> Meritocracy: In a meritocracy, the most qualified people for a job are selected for that job. In a do-ocracy, whoever does the job gets it, no matter how well they’re qualified.
I'd add that "merit" is a less useful concept to construct an organization around than "doing". Merit is impossible to measure, and every measure prone both to being gamed and to unfairly underestimating people and shutting them out, but is also the wrong thing to optimize for. The thing you want to optimize for is the work being, and for the overall effort to result in a high quality end product. Most parts of a given project aren't particularly critical and it doesn't matter who does them as long as they're done. If a particular part of the project is struggling, then the problem is that they needs support, not that they have "insufficient merit;" taking the unnecessary moral component out of it makes it easier to see what the problem is and to organize the resources to solve it. If some role is sensitive and requires special qualifications, that's an exception that can be dealt with as it arises (and if you're in a problem space where that's the rule and not the exception, fair enough, perhaps this isn't the approach for you).
I've not been in an organization that labeled itself a "DoOcracy", but it sounds like it's potentially less political and more productive than meritocracy.
> In a meritocracy, the most qualified people for a job are selected for that job. In a do-ocracy, whoever does the job gets it, no matter how well they’re qualified.
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
This is a possibility if diplomacy fails. But diplomacy and dialog should happen first. Going public and publishing this open letter is a sign that other forms of diplomacy did not work (including private messages).
Although people secretly created the company month ago, the first public hint of its existence showed when someone inadvertently mentioned being bound by an NDA. Which raised questions that they could not answer... because they were bound by an NDA.
Am I right in assuming that though lots of work has happened in gitea since the fork, at least half of the code there was still written by the guy behind gogs?
They're just going to form a for-profit based on his work and cut him out entirely?
It's MIT licensed, so anyone can incorporate based on the original author's work and turn a profit. He is not owed anything. This is an eventuality you are implicitly accepting when choosing MIT over GPL.
Of course they're legally allowed to do so, it's just a question of does it make sense vis-a-vis their stated values about community and rewarding the people who has worked on the project.
GPL or MIT doesn't really matter all that much here; the only difference is that with the GPL I'd have release all the source. There is nothing in the GPL stopping me from starting a Compiler Inc.™ SaaS based on gcc that "compiles code as a service".
The issue isn't about access to the code (which is not threatened at all). The issue is about community enjoying access to the project name and domain name.
As an outsider this is not compelling. Claims aren't substantiated or given context (I would expect links to promises and explanations of how specific actors have violated them). There is also a lot of work being expected in the form of non profit companies and organizational structures and seemingly very little volunteering to do that work, which to my eye is immediately suspect.
I guess I'd expect this document to better substantiate why being elected puts this duty on these people, and why that claim is more significant than if I elected the author of this letter as Viceroy of Bringing Me Lunch?
The Gitea Open Letter has links to the two documents that have the facts you ask for, at the bottom of the page. And with links within the text. They are:
Presumably the author of this letter didn't participate in a process of deciding the person in charge of bringing you lunch is an elected position, didn't put themselves forward to it and didn't agree to the process happening at all.
The project is quite large and cannot be easily migrated without loss of data, due to rate limits in Github's API's. The preparation has been long going, but they are nearing a point where they move the project to a gitea server. That's vendor lock-in, right there.
The Gitea repo is actually not that big. The harder part is converting issue and pull request metadata from the GitHub archive which they reference here:
The migration bundles all of that up so I assume the holdup is writing something that can covert that archive to something Gitea understands or can use.
I find it very interesting how the person who put together this open letter has a company they started to sell Gitea, and is not even a maintainer of Gitea. So he hasn't even voted. Seems like a very suspicious conflict of interest that should be taken into account, and is very likely acting in bad faith.
Update: Looking at your comment history, you seem to be a 'damage control' account, created at the announcement of Gitea Ltd. I call that bad faith pur sang.
Sounds like some sort of hostile takeover was successfully implemented. Seems kind of silly writing something like this. Hey people that beat us over the head and took our stuff, can you be nice now and do A, B, and C?
Time to walk away and let it burn if that is the case.
I get tired of community uprisings and activism that fundamentally misunderstand how open source works, fork it.
If you're not the in the top producers in a DoOcracy then you neglected your right to exert influence in the direction of the project.
I've led a few larger projects and the rate at which the least of us will have the biggest opinions about who is -owed- what is flabbergasting.
DoOcracy's are great, but they often flame out with the top contributor finding one day they have a self-appointed board of directors for a passion-project that they just wanted to share with the world.
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.
Sometime people make mistakes, big ones. That happens and this open letter gives them the opportunity to make right by the community. A fork is a last resort option, when everything else failed. Patience and understanding is a good thing in Free Software communities. Even when facing what appears to be a malicious action.
This is the step right before forking. If diplomacy fails, then you fork. A silent fork is much less likely to gain traction. This letter raises awareness for the problem and is the reaction to it is a solid foundation for a fork.
Your improvements to the code do not require 'traction'. The only thing that undoes a do-ocracy is another do-er, and that starts with a fork, like how Gitea started.
Right to the source code is a completely separate issue from rights to the project name and domain name. You can guarantee decentralised access to the source code but you can't guarantee the same for the name and domain.
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.
> 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 entirely explained by survivorship bias. The matural social interactions which are the bread and butter of open source never bubble up to your purview because they aren't dramatic and interesting.
This is such a key insight into understanding the world in general. What you see vs what's actually going on overall are two completely different things.
Every larger community (or even medium sized ones) have friction around collaboration, as they are efforts to reach a common goal but not always is the way of achieving those goals agreed upon by everyone (or sometimes, not even the goal is common).
The only difference between open source community and private ones is that the discussion ("the social drama") tends to be done out in the open for everyone to see in the open source ones, while in the private ones it happens behind closed doors or between individuals behind peoples back.
Thats because disputes tend to get a lot more attention than things that work well.
For example, it seems you never saw any of the news about how the Python community calmly and carefully discussed what they were going to do to move forward after Guido resigned as BDFL?
> anything related to the open source world bubble up into the public I am only reminded of high school and college level social drama.
That's because open source washes its dirty laundry in public. The same things happen behind closed doors in companies all the time, it's called office politics, and yes, it is exhausting.
> 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.
Fork it and move on. Humanity has shown it’s all about control of ethno-bubbles.
Our biology seeks power and influence. Rent seeking.
Stop giving it to these ephemeral terms, logos, memes, and importing the gibberish of outsiders, giving them influence.
Don’t give them anymore attention, fork the repo. The people behind these projects are just people. They’re not owed fealty and chance after chance given this behavior happens all the time and users complain all the time when they do. Stop feeding the identity of the sorts who do this. They’re figurative nobodies and random meat bags of billions. Treat them with the same lack of respect in return. There’s no making nice with this kind of agency. Flip it off and walk away.
You can't slander them by saying they're throwing a tantrum, without even talking about what parts of the document you're referring to or why it is you feel that way, and then decry how they're not giving anyone the benefit of the doubt. That is pearl clutching.
Writing them to resolve this issue in good faith, is giving them the benefit of the doubt.
So I think the entire doc as a first step in supposed good communication is in bad faith. Bringing this out into the public, and being on the front page of HN makes it seem like a stunt, and for pressure, not a good faith plea. I feel like a private conversation between the concerned parties should have happened first, and if it did that should have been mentioned. If that didn't work then maybe make it public for pressure, and then fork (and or consider legal action to get the trademarks if there's grounds idk not a lawyer).
If people's idea of good first step communication is to create a public letter with accusatory undertones and get it plastered places, I don't want to work with those people. They went from 0mph to 120mph way too quickly.
Talk about "feeding the outrage machine". The irony is thick in this thread wirh people who are outraged by "outrage culture", without being specific (trademarks and website, and the broken promise on community ownership of these assets). Even the current top comment complains in the abstract - people have become what they hate as they fight the culture wars.
I highly recommend Adam Curtis' documentary "The Mayfair Set" [1], especially Part 2, detailing the lives of Jim Slater, Tiny Rowland and James Goldsmith who pioneered the hostile takeover, and the effect of acquisitions and mergers on the overall global economy. Hard to imagine that only 50 years ago this wasn't a "done thing". Today I see these same patterns play out in development and artistic communities oblivious to 51 percent and Sybil attacks, unaware of who is holding what key assets, and then being surprised by takeovers and defectors.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mayfair_Set
> The release of Pandora's Box (1992) marked the introduction of Curtis's distinctive presentation that uses collage to explore aspects of sociology, psychology, philosophy and political history. His style has been described as involving, "whiplash digressions, menacing atmospherics and arpeggiated scores, and the near-psychedelic compilation of archival footage", narrated by Curtis himself with "patrician economy and assertion".
Is this guy in fact the inventor of the annoying modern style of political documentary, where I have to listen to anxiety-inducing drones and the worst kind of movie-trailer voice, nonstop for an hour at least? The one used by shittiest propaganda tv channels? And for some inexplicable reason also borrowed by Youtube personalities that supposedly appeal to thinking, educated people in opposition to that propaganda tv.
> annoying modern style of political documentary, where I have to > listen to anxiety-inducing drones and the worst kind of > movie-trailer voice, nonstop for an hour least?
Well you're in for a real treat with "Russia:Trauma Zone" then. Curtis listened to all the bleating criticisms and delivered six hours of absolutely bare footage, which juxtaposed and sequenced speaks for itself. The result is even more powerful than ever before - which shows that incorporating criticism, even when it's only about surface style, pays off.
The only criticism I have is that the title is a bit bland.
It should gave been called "Natasha's Boots". She is the star of the show. And in the ened she gets her boots.
> that propaganda tv
All TV and social media is propaganda. Even cat videos. It propagates. It carries a message. Even if the message is "Don't think".
1 reply →
This is in response to:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33339421
A bit of context (why this matters) is useful: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#...
> Since Gitea is a pure community organization without any company support, to keep the development healthy we will elect three owners every year.
> When the new owners have been elected, the old owners will give up ownership to the newly elected owners
According to CONTRIBUTING.md, this dates back to 2016. The new company represents a shift from the community model that attracted many developers and users.
The issue is that ultimately Lunny holds the trademark and isn't legally bound to uphold whatever agreement is stated in the repo.
It may be the case that Lunny forgot he has a moral obligation to the Gitea community that elected him year after year. Even though there is no legally binding contract.
What was done is morally unacceptable. But that can be easily fixed. Just give it all back!
6 replies →
As I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I'm a contributor to gitea and have no ownership in the new organization. I genuinely would like some clarification to the points in the letter, as I'm trying to advise the owners and understand my future with the project.
It seems like the demands are:
> Implementing an intuitive and fair election process.
I think we do that now: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#... Anyone who has contributed to the gitea project more than 2x PRs is invited to be a maintainer. Every maintainer gets 3 votes. Maybe there are some suggestions for improving - please open a PR.
> Describing the ways in which democratic decisions are to be made.
Again, I'm just confused what's being requested. Moving on.
> Providing accessible places where all relevant information can be found.
This seems like the same request as above. Or maybe a request for better documentation. I agree. Open a PR, don't fork gitea.
> Establishing a DoOcracy that works and continue to improve it.
I agree with this and I suspect that was the intention with the original reference to DAOs, but needs to be clarified.
> A non-profit organisation owned by the Gitea community is created. > The Gitea trademark and domains are transferred to the non-profit. > The name of the company is changed to avoid any confusion with the non-profit.
Does anyone have experience with how this is typically handled? It seems like this is the only actionable request. What are some examples of non-profit open-source companies? Is that typical?
There only are three demands:
> A non-profit organisation owned by the Gitea community is created.
> The Gitea trademark and domains are transferred to the non-profit.
> The name of the company is changed to avoid any confusion with the non-profit.
A week ago the Gitea project was an informal community trusting elected individuals with essential assets such as the domains and the trademark. They had a clear moral bound (see https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#...) to pass on the ownership of the project to their successor.
But they thought it was ok to create a company and take the domains and trademark as if they were their property. Maybe the absence of a legal bound made them forget their promise, their moral obligation towards the Gitea community.
Creating a non-profit will avoid that kind of problem in the future and give back the domains and the trademark to the Gitea community. If the president of a non-profit was to transfer the domain name to a for-profit company they exclusively control, the members of the non profit will be in a position to sue the president for embezzlement.
If the for profit company refuses to give back the domains and trademark, that would be very damaging to the project. The post from Harald Welte on that topic in the Gitea forum is enlightening in that regard, see https://discourse.gitea.io/t/open-source-sustainment-and-the...
The other points you cite from the Open Letter are merely suggestions for future improvements (as stated in the letter), not demands.
Shades of Freenode.
> What are some examples of non-profit open-source companies? Is that typical?
The Apache foundation? FSF? The Mozilla foundation (which is different but related to the for-profit Mozilla Corporation)? The rust foundation? CNCF? Probably many others.
It would also probably be possible to find a suitable existing non-profit that could act as a steward of these resources.
...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 here. Reading that the name may be more important than the code is just very off-putting.
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.
> Anyone can come in and use those assets.
That's not quite right: trademarks are different to copyright. Most open source licenses grant a copyright licenses, but not the trademark.
Over a decade ago there was a kerfuffle when Mozilla didn't approve of Debian's Firefox patchset and asserted that Debian couldn't use the name "Firefox" for the (still licensed for redistribution) source code Debian had. They had the rights to use, modify and redistribute the Firefox code - but not the name. For a while, the Mozilla browser was known as "IceWeasel" on Debian and Debian variants.
On the other hand... OpenOffice vs. LibreOffice. Clearly the name was immensely valuable in that case.
Is it?
I quickly accepted LibreOffice as "the new OpenOffice". It happens all the time, MariaDB is the new MySQL, uBlock Origin is the new uBlock, etc...
I expect that if Gitea messes up, the community will quickly fork and the fork will overcome the original. And considering the scope of the tool. For people who install and manage Gitea instances, keeping up to date with the tech world is often part of their job, so I don't expect a name change to be such a big deal. Gitea users are typically developers, which I hope are tech savvy enough not to be thrown off by a change in logo (assuming the instance is not rebranded).
1 reply →
Hudson and Jenkins too
https://medium.com/swlh/hudson-is-retiring-the-end-of-a-jenk...
The new name was the issue, it was too clever and close to the original. OfficeSuite or IceOffice or TerraOffice. Something about the word Libre makes it seem like the outdated copy.
Sure it was immensely valuable. But imagine if the code disappeared overnight. Then LibreOffice wouldn't be were it is now.
2 replies →
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_...
> 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?
i think the point is that the code isn't really an "asset" of an open-source project, because anybody who wants to take it can have it, regardless of their affiliation with the "project".
gitea is a brand. whoever owns the domain and trademarks owns the brand.
See for example: https://bonebaboon.tilde.site/rust-trademark-policy-issue/
Trademarks can be a burden to FLOSS.
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
I have no desire to poo-poo your contributions, but with 30 commits over a 2 year period and very sporadic engagement on the issue tracker, "contributor" seems completely fair but "maintainer" seems a bit much.
Maintainers are the people who are involved reasonably consistently for the long term, and also do the un-sexy work of tracking down the (sometimes difficult) bugs people report, triage the (unclear) issues people report, deal with generic support requests, and all of that.
1 reply →
> It's not supported by a vast majority of the maintainers of the project and spearheaded by folks who have contributed very little.
I feel that here you demonstrate some of the improvements that can be made to the project. This stance shows that the view on what constitutes the Community around the project is quite narrow: Contribute a lot of code and you matter. Commits + LoC or be silent.
While that is a logical perspective and how many FOSS projects look upon community, it neglects all the people in different roles that have a warm heart for the project and do activities that may be less visible than that. Like taking time to advocate the project across the web wherever they can. Or those working in a broader ecosystem in other projects where you indirectly benefit. Codeberg is an example who maintain a downstream fork, and where people like Otto Richter act like delegated maintainers and handling a lot of user feedback. Or the group of projects involved in forge federation, that did the brunt work where Gitea benefits tremendously [0].
The announcement of Gitea Ltd and the follow-up with the Open Letter did a lot of good in that respect. For the first time there's broader open discussion on strategical aspects and long-term project direction where many of the community have their say. Though the open letter only gives indications of the kinds of community project improvements that can be made, these last couple of days a ton of feedback has been posted on how these could actually be shaped.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29830061
> TL;DR: give us some time to set it all straight and if it really looks like incentives are misaligned…
… it’ll be top late for anyone to do anything about it?
If you’re not trying to capitalize on the community project then simply follow the demands. Put the name and domain in a non-profit and run your company on the side. If your insentives turn out to misallign, or your CEO decides to sell the company to Microsoft just to have the en shut everything down, the community loses nothing except of the current model you’ve proposed where they lose pretty much everything because your plan was just “trust us bros”.
A few of the top contributors are the one behind the company. It is fair to assume they are perfectly ok with stealing from the community as it directly benefits them...
Copyright doesn't exist in a vacuum someone owns the copyright on the logo, it's up to them to determine who they want to transfer / license that to. Trademark will be up to the USPTO and other jurisdictional bodies to determine who has the right to use it to minimize confusion to consumers.
The people doing all the work are "stealing" from the "community" that contributes much less? If someone wants to fork here, it seems like they would also need to step up the amount of contributions they're doing if the people currently doing the work are the ones organizing a way to make some money to pay for their time.
1 reply →
What has been stolen from the community exactly? The trademarks were never theirs, and the copyright still is.
1 reply →
I'm a user of gitea and sympathetic to this open letter but it doesn't mean much without significant contributors signing on, and being marked as such. I assume the Gogs developer isn't happy about this but I don't see his name either. Right now it's unclear the connection of the signees to the Gitea project.
1 reply →
Here's an explanation of DoOcracy, as linked from the open letter:
https://communitywiki.org/wiki/DoOcracy
(If you're like me and hadn't heard of the concept before.)
In bicycle culture they do an unorganized event called critical mass; in the past I've seen these events hijacked by a "xerocracy" where someone shows up to the meeting point, starts handing out (xeroxed/photo copied) fliers with a map with a different route and then take off in that direction and.... most of the crowd follows them. Different kind of Do-ing but very effective in truly flat hierachies when executed well.
This is more common than you think when you get into alleycat races where you're racing for money.
Problem with doocracy is it also doesn't care what the doer does.
"Why did you punch me in the face?"
"Shut up, it was free. I do all this work for free and you ungrateful parasite users just complain."
That was very interesting, might make a good submission on its own. I really enjoyed what seemed like an attempt at a neutral description without proselytization.
Sounds like a rebrand of meritocracy.
Addressed in the document:
> Meritocracy: In a meritocracy, the most qualified people for a job are selected for that job. In a do-ocracy, whoever does the job gets it, no matter how well they’re qualified.
I'd add that "merit" is a less useful concept to construct an organization around than "doing". Merit is impossible to measure, and every measure prone both to being gamed and to unfairly underestimating people and shutting them out, but is also the wrong thing to optimize for. The thing you want to optimize for is the work being, and for the overall effort to result in a high quality end product. Most parts of a given project aren't particularly critical and it doesn't matter who does them as long as they're done. If a particular part of the project is struggling, then the problem is that they needs support, not that they have "insufficient merit;" taking the unnecessary moral component out of it makes it easier to see what the problem is and to organize the resources to solve it. If some role is sensitive and requires special qualifications, that's an exception that can be dealt with as it arises (and if you're in a problem space where that's the rule and not the exception, fair enough, perhaps this isn't the approach for you).
I've not been in an organization that labeled itself a "DoOcracy", but it sounds like it's potentially less political and more productive than meritocracy.
The link contrasts it with meritocracy as this:
> In a meritocracy, the most qualified people for a job are selected for that job. In a do-ocracy, whoever does the job gets it, no matter how well they’re qualified.
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
The original is https://github.com/gogs/gogs, which is an active MIT project with 10k more stars than gitea, there's nothing inscrutable about it.
Gitea was a fork of Gogs. I'm assuming we'll see a fork of Gitea now?
I'm also reminded of Audacity, so maybe we'll see a half-way popular fork and then the "parent" amending their ways?
I never saw a follow up to the audacity kerfuffle. Is there any follow ups to whats going on there?
3 replies →
GCC actually gave up and simply went with their fork, egcs:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Compiler_Collection#EGCS_f...
worked for iojs and nodejs
1 reply →
This is a possibility if diplomacy fails. But diplomacy and dialog should happen first. Going public and publishing this open letter is a sign that other forms of diplomacy did not work (including private messages).
Although people secretly created the company month ago, the first public hint of its existence showed when someone inadvertently mentioned being bound by an NDA. Which raised questions that they could not answer... because they were bound by an NDA.
That was in July 2022.
Am I right in assuming that though lots of work has happened in gitea since the fork, at least half of the code there was still written by the guy behind gogs?
They're just going to form a for-profit based on his work and cut him out entirely?
It's MIT licensed, so anyone can incorporate based on the original author's work and turn a profit. He is not owed anything. This is an eventuality you are implicitly accepting when choosing MIT over GPL.
Of course they're legally allowed to do so, it's just a question of does it make sense vis-a-vis their stated values about community and rewarding the people who has worked on the project.
GPL or MIT doesn't really matter all that much here; the only difference is that with the GPL I'd have release all the source. There is nothing in the GPL stopping me from starting a Compiler Inc.™ SaaS based on gcc that "compiles code as a service".
I'm confused, this would also be true with the GPL, no (just with the added restriction they would have to redistribute their changes)?
My understanding is the point of free software is that you can do (almost) anything you want with it, including sell it.
The issue isn't about access to the code (which is not threatened at all). The issue is about community enjoying access to the project name and domain name.
As an outsider this is not compelling. Claims aren't substantiated or given context (I would expect links to promises and explanations of how specific actors have violated them). There is also a lot of work being expected in the form of non profit companies and organizational structures and seemingly very little volunteering to do that work, which to my eye is immediately suspect.
I guess I'd expect this document to better substantiate why being elected puts this duty on these people, and why that claim is more significant than if I elected the author of this letter as Viceroy of Bringing Me Lunch?
The Gitea Open Letter has links to the two documents that have the facts you ask for, at the bottom of the page. And with links within the text. They are:
https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#... https://blog.gitea.io/2022/10/open-source-sustainment-and-th...
Presumably the author of this letter didn't participate in a process of deciding the person in charge of bringing you lunch is an elected position, didn't put themselves forward to it and didn't agree to the process happening at all.
Is this yet another case of a liberal license project gone proprietary after the contributions of many developers in the community?
If so, this seems like a reminder of why the GPL and its variants are important.
What was born in a fork will die in a fork.
I find it odd that gitea uses github.
The project is quite large and cannot be easily migrated without loss of data, due to rate limits in Github's API's. The preparation has been long going, but they are nearing a point where they move the project to a gitea server. That's vendor lock-in, right there.
The Gitea repo is actually not that big. The harder part is converting issue and pull request metadata from the GitHub archive which they reference here:
https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/pull/18165
The migration bundles all of that up so I assume the holdup is writing something that can covert that archive to something Gitea understands or can use.
1 reply →
I find it very interesting how the person who put together this open letter has a company they started to sell Gitea, and is not even a maintainer of Gitea. So he hasn't even voted. Seems like a very suspicious conflict of interest that should be taken into account, and is very likely acting in bad faith.
Citation needed.
Update: Looking at your comment history, you seem to be a 'damage control' account, created at the announcement of Gitea Ltd. I call that bad faith pur sang.
Sounds like some sort of hostile takeover was successfully implemented. Seems kind of silly writing something like this. Hey people that beat us over the head and took our stuff, can you be nice now and do A, B, and C?
Time to walk away and let it burn if that is the case.
it sounds like these community members are welcome to fork it and change the name.
I get tired of community uprisings and activism that fundamentally misunderstand how open source works, fork it.
If you're not the in the top producers in a DoOcracy then you neglected your right to exert influence in the direction of the project.
I've led a few larger projects and the rate at which the least of us will have the biggest opinions about who is -owed- what is flabbergasting.
DoOcracy's are great, but they often flame out with the top contributor finding one day they have a self-appointed board of directors for a passion-project that they just wanted to share with the world.
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.
10 replies →
Sometime people make mistakes, big ones. That happens and this open letter gives them the opportunity to make right by the community. A fork is a last resort option, when everything else failed. Patience and understanding is a good thing in Free Software communities. Even when facing what appears to be a malicious action.
The dispute here isn't about the code. It's about the domain name and trademark.
9 replies →
This is the step right before forking. If diplomacy fails, then you fork. A silent fork is much less likely to gain traction. This letter raises awareness for the problem and is the reaction to it is a solid foundation for a fork.
Your improvements to the code do not require 'traction'. The only thing that undoes a do-ocracy is another do-er, and that starts with a fork, like how Gitea started.
1 reply →
Right to the source code is a completely separate issue from rights to the project name and domain name. You can guarantee decentralised access to the source code but you can't guarantee the same for the name and domain.
The word "just" is doing a lot of work here.
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 entirely explained by survivorship bias. The matural social interactions which are the bread and butter of open source never bubble up to your purview because they aren't dramatic and interesting.
This is such a key insight into understanding the world in general. What you see vs what's actually going on overall are two completely different things.
I wish those mature normal dynamics got more spotlight, not just in OSS but the general world. All the air is taken up by drama like this.
2 replies →
Every larger community (or even medium sized ones) have friction around collaboration, as they are efforts to reach a common goal but not always is the way of achieving those goals agreed upon by everyone (or sometimes, not even the goal is common).
The only difference between open source community and private ones is that the discussion ("the social drama") tends to be done out in the open for everyone to see in the open source ones, while in the private ones it happens behind closed doors or between individuals behind peoples back.
Thats because disputes tend to get a lot more attention than things that work well.
For example, it seems you never saw any of the news about how the Python community calmly and carefully discussed what they were going to do to move forward after Guido resigned as BDFL?
Disputes are not unique to open source projects. But they usually have no hierarchies and no contracts. So disputes are settled this way.
> anything related to the open source world bubble up into the public I am only reminded of high school and college level social drama.
That's because open source washes its dirty laundry in public. The same things happen behind closed doors in companies all the time, it's called office politics, and yes, it is exhausting.
> 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.
Honestly put me off ever wanting to get involved.
Fork it and move on. Humanity has shown it’s all about control of ethno-bubbles.
Our biology seeks power and influence. Rent seeking.
Stop giving it to these ephemeral terms, logos, memes, and importing the gibberish of outsiders, giving them influence.
Don’t give them anymore attention, fork the repo. The people behind these projects are just people. They’re not owed fealty and chance after chance given this behavior happens all the time and users complain all the time when they do. Stop feeding the identity of the sorts who do this. They’re figurative nobodies and random meat bags of billions. Treat them with the same lack of respect in return. There’s no making nice with this kind of agency. Flip it off and walk away.
While communication may not have been handled perfectly, this is an annoyed, entitled, entirely unnecessary tract.
Tellingly, it never appears to be the ones who do the actual work who throw such tantrums.
And how about just extending the benefit of the doubt instead of immediately feeding the outrage machine?
You can't slander them by saying they're throwing a tantrum, without even talking about what parts of the document you're referring to or why it is you feel that way, and then decry how they're not giving anyone the benefit of the doubt. That is pearl clutching.
Writing them to resolve this issue in good faith, is giving them the benefit of the doubt.
Outsider opinion:
So I think the entire doc as a first step in supposed good communication is in bad faith. Bringing this out into the public, and being on the front page of HN makes it seem like a stunt, and for pressure, not a good faith plea. I feel like a private conversation between the concerned parties should have happened first, and if it did that should have been mentioned. If that didn't work then maybe make it public for pressure, and then fork (and or consider legal action to get the trademarks if there's grounds idk not a lawyer).
If people's idea of good first step communication is to create a public letter with accusatory undertones and get it plastered places, I don't want to work with those people. They went from 0mph to 120mph way too quickly.
5 replies →
Talk about "feeding the outrage machine". The irony is thick in this thread wirh people who are outraged by "outrage culture", without being specific (trademarks and website, and the broken promise on community ownership of these assets). Even the current top comment complains in the abstract - people have become what they hate as they fight the culture wars.
> Tellingly, it never appears to be the ones who do the actual work who throw such tantrums.
I recognize at least 2 names in the top five as devs that I personally collaborated with in order to add features to Gitea.
> Tellingly, it never appears to be the ones who do the actual work who throw such tantrums.
And how do you know that, if I may ask?
1 reply →
> And how about just extending the benefit of the doubt instead of immediately feeding the outrage machine?
You give them an inch, they’ll take a mile.