Comment by tinalumfoil
3 years ago
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.
3 years ago
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
[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.
True, there are definitely better and more consistent developers than me on the project. However, that's the term the gitea project uses. I should've linked to the maintainers list: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/blob/main/MAINTAINERS
> 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.
The example of Emby vs Jellyfin is illustrative here. Emby was "the open source Plex alternative", then they went commercial, then they went closed source. The community forked the last open release as Jellyfin, and despite most of the previous contributors being employed by Emby and the Jellyfin community being newer contributors, it's clear that Jellyfin has overtaken Emby these days, and has put more of a dent in Plex market share than Emby ever did.
Or I mean even Gitea has been on the other side of this, while the Gitea contributors _were_ gogs contributors pre-fork, they were not the largest.
What has been stolen from the community exactly? The trademarks were never theirs, and the copyright still is.
1. The community governance structure that was promised by the Gitea developers
2. The reassurance that Gitea would be a stable platform to build on without having to compromise between the open source project and a commercial variant
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.
Do I think it will persuade Gitea Ltd to give back the domains and the trademark? Honestly, I don't have high hopes. Even if each and every contributor to Gitea signed the letter, I'm unconvinced they will do right by the community.
This open letter had to be published even if it has little chance to be effective. It would be horribly wrong for something like that to happen in a Free Software project without offering a simple and gentle way to do right.
Ultimately it is quite possible the only solution will be a fork. And as the Gogs fork showed, it only takes a handful of motivated developers to succeed.