Comment by kbolino

It actually starts with Gogs.

Gogs is FOSS but basically BDFL. What does and does not make it into Gogs (it's still around) is ultimately decided by one person, and he's fairly conservative. Gogs is very fast but lacks a lot of features that would allow it to go head-to-head with GitHub or Gitlab.

So, Gitea was forked from Gogs to allow it to take a different direction, with a larger group of maintainers and more input from the user community.

There were two major attempts to have hosted Gitea. The first was Codeberg, a nonprofit based in the EU. The second is a business that took the name Gitea, is based in the US, and changed Gitea (the software) to the "open core, closed premium" model.

This change led to the creation of the Forgejo fork, which Codeberg adopted.