Comment by dachary
3 years ago
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...
3 years ago
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.