LWN: Comments on "Forgejo makes a full break from Gitea"

Forgejo makes a full break from Gitea

mattdm — Sun, 07 Apr 2024 19:13:54 +0000

I'm inclined to be sympathetic to the moderators here.

It looks like they're trying to use the issue tracker for a formal decision-making process (described at the top of the first issue you link) and to route other discussion to a linked forum topic (or possibly several). It's frustrating when tons of people come in and ignore that process, and then even double-down by posting that they don't like that posts not following what was asked are removed.

Forgejo makes a full break from Gitea

Wol — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 21:45:21 +0000

Problem is, as I'm finding out, many companies demand a support contract. Open Core, in those circumstances, makes a lot of sense.

I shall be using Scarlet, but my employer would rather pay for OpenQM ... oh well ...

Cheers,
Wol

Forgejo makes a full break from Gitea

marcH — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 16:47:05 +0000

> My opinion is you should always be scared of open core projects. The developers have incentive to do what's good for the controlling company, not what is good for the project.

Well yes of course "open-core" is more risky in the long term than a truly neutral project. But it's less risky than closed source like GitHub. There's a whole spectrum of long term risks but long term is often "another CEO's problem". To get products to the market today, users need a solution that works today and that requires a tested and supported product. Because marginal costs are so small, software is where economies of scale have the strongest effect, that's why we have so many monopolies - both closed and open source.

Forgejo makes a full break from Gitea

SLi — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 14:35:57 +0000

Uhh, I looked at a few of their issues around governance, and for a project that is new and that I've never heard of, I must say I feel a bit put off already.

https://codeberg.org/forgejo/governance/issues/58
https://codeberg.org/forgejo/discussions/issues/112
https://codeberg.org/forgejo/governance/issues/16

It seems to me there's a lot of "this comment was removed for being off topic", "moderation discussions are off topic", "that comment was removed because the user is banned", and what feels like a decent amount of vitriol.

It seems like an ostensibly very democratic approach. I'm not sure such a software project can function if it's democratic instead of being more do-ocratic. But I wish them good luck nevertheless.

Forgejo makes a full break from Gitea

brunowolff — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 14:07:58 +0000

My opinion is you should always be scared of open core projects. The developers have incentive to do what's good for the controlling company, not what is good for the project. You can't contribute improvements that they feel will make the free of charge version too good. That doesn't mean you should never use such software, but you need to be prepared in case they alter the deal.
You should also be scared of companies that weaponize licences, like what used to happen with mysql.

Forgejo makes a full break from Gitea

paulj — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 10:33:34 +0000

Well, let's try justify how a corporate entity setup to pay programmers to work on some software should be given a special tax status and benefits. I don't think the social good is /anywhere/ near high enough to justify it. The good goes primarily to a few programmers, and managers/bizdev types - in terms of the money spent. The social good of the software is limited, compared to the benefit that goes to the programmers.

In the US, the 501.3c status is just too easy to get, and there is insufficient monitoring of it to prevent abuse. That is my experience. Charity status in the likes of the UK and Ireland is harder to acquire - I hope it is better monitored - so I think we see fewer charitable organisations for Free Software.

Forgejo makes a full break from Gitea

vasvir — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 08:47:06 +0000

it depends also on the size of the shop and the company and where in the growth curve the decision must be taken.

For example: Small company with 3-5 developers.

I had to move from trac and subversion so I spent sometime for the transition.

I installed gitlab but it looked to me so heavy that was pointless.

I installed gitea and was like a fresh breeze of air. I managed to figure our the schema and help trac2gitea to move my bugs.

Maybe gitea misses a ton of things that github/gitlab already have. I don't know. I can't tell.

All I know is that it works for me and my limited resources. Maybe a bigger team will hit its limits.

Forgejo makes a full break from Gitea

marcH — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 18:50:07 +0000

Interesting but what matters most is the quantity and quality of engineers paid to do the work. Even with AI supposedly writing code you still need good engineers to review it, validate it and support it - in increasing order of work open-source developers are not interested in. Big, active open-source projects like linux, LLVM etc. have matured and generally been successful because _companies_ have poured billions in them. There's a reason why we constantly complain about companies "free-riding" on poorly maintained open-source projects (https://xkcd.com/2347/ etc.): it's because when companies _do_ fund (a small number of) really open-source projects then they work.

So I bet Gitlab is far from perfect but I don't see how any of these projects could beat it right now. For alternatives to succeed, Oracle would have to buy Gitlab and kill it as they usually do. Conversely, if Gitlab management is smart enough then they will always keep their "open-core" big enough not to scare away most users and customers. Then projects like sourcehut, Forgejo and others will stay "fringe": used only by people who care more about software "freedom" than getting their job done. That is: a very small and very opiniated minority who loves... forking and fragmentation.

Forgejo makes a full break from Gitea

marcH — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 18:32:02 +0000

> And I quit within 6 months because of the shenanigans.
> [...]
> This is because the interests of the software are bound too much with the interests of the programmers working on it. There is no way to disentangle them.

Potentially interesting but falling too short.

Also, a single experience can always make a good story but is it really representative? Structures matter but IMHO leaders and personalities matter much more.

Forgejo makes a full break from Gitea

paulj — Mon, 26 Feb 2024 14:15:54 +0000

Personally, having worked for a 501.3c that was meant to exist for the good of certain Free Software, I am very sceptical of having charity corps for Free Software development. I thought charity (or "public benefit" as in the US 501.3c) status was a good path for Free Software stewards. Then I worked in one. And I quit within 6 months because of the shenanigans.

Now I think that corporate entities that are setup to further the interests of a Free Software project absolutely must not be charities/public-benefit. They should be trade-organisations or non-profit corporates (i.e., non-profit simply by articles of incorporation - but *not* with any special tax status).

This is because the interests of the software are bound too much with the interests of the programmers working on it. There is no way to disentangle them. If you have a corporate setup to pay programmers to work on software, it should /not/ have special tax exemptions. It's just intrinsic abuse if it has such exemptions. It should rather be setup to just not make a profit, at most.

Forgejo makes a full break from Gitea

misc — Mon, 26 Feb 2024 10:34:39 +0000

I personally don't. The main founder of Forgejo also created the project because Gitea Inc was going to compete on his business idea (eg, offering forge hosting see https://forum.gna.org/t/hostea-horizontal-free-software-a... , see https://forum.gitea.com/t/a-gitea-hosting-service-under-t... , and see the timing of the initial fork and the vast amount of discussion around that ), but that part is usually not mentioned anywhere. He also got into fight with one existing designer of Gitea, again a point not mentioned around the narrative of the split ( see https://forum.gitea.com/t/gitea-contributor-feedback/4630 ).

I also have a rather strange feeling around some accounts coming out of nowhere on Github just to work on his PRs only, given he has a reputation for shady stuff (after discussing with a few french folks over the years to see if it was me being too paranoid or not).

We worked in the same coworking space around 2021/2022 while his focus was fedeproxy ( https://lab.forgefriends.org/fedeproxy/fedeproxy ). I wasn't working on that, I just happened to be there, and the project looked weird right from the start as it was built on the idea that people would donate PAT for the Github interop ( that's the initial goal: https://forgefriends.org/blog/2021/01/16/what-is-fedeproxy/ ). I mentioned this was likely a T&S violation, and that it would result in a mess due to lack of user impersonation, but it took 6 months before this part was dropped (6 months while the project was being financed full time thanks to a EU grant ).

In the mean time, I was also surprised to see them importing bookwyrm code, as bookwyrm was and still is non free ( https://lab.forgefriends.org/fedeproxy/fedeproxy/-/merge_... ). Errors happens, but I kinda expected more from a free software veteran that refused to use github because that was non free.

And now I recall that time, during one of our first discussion on the topic of community growth and best practices, he mentioned that in the past, some people tried to weaponize CoC against him (and started rumors ). In theory, that's something that could happen, but in practice, that's kinda a red flag, especially when mentioned quasi unprompted to a guy that you barely know (but I know my face make people tell their life, so I wasn't that surprised in practice ).

And when I look what was achieved on the forgejo side, I also do not see much progress, most of the time was spent rebasing while gitea folks were doing the work. Federation is being worked on since more than 3 years now, and more if you count the numerous previous projects ( like forgefed was created in 2018: https://github.com/forgefed/forgefed/issues/5 ). There is still not much to show. The only substantial code was written by a PhD student at the MIT (student that wrote that independently of the 3 or 4 different standards projects ). People do not even have mockup of what the UX would look like, or the type of workflow that are worked on. This is not surprising, since federation is becoming a empty signifier. It give fuzzy feeling of freedom of movement, self hosting, etc. But in practice, that's unclear what would happen.

If you look at the roadmap in June 2022 ( https://forgefriends.org/blog/2022/06/30/2022-06-state-fo... ), you can see that nothing happened, or is bound to happen by June 2024 (eg, in 3 months ). Sure, forking take time, but not that much time before getting at least 1 project out of the door.

Forgejo makes a full break from Gitea

smurf — Sat, 24 Feb 2024 19:03:48 +0000

> Whether tax-deductible donations are possible is a separate distinction

Not in Germany. "Tax deductible donations" and "severely constrained in how and for what funds are spent" are pretty much the same thing here.

And that's the point. You can set up a nice ostensibly-not-for-profit corporation that "owns" your code base all you want, but that basically means that its owners are hopefully-B-DFLs and can spend the income any way they personally want. Even setting up such a structure without a community discussion, let alone consensus, is enough of a red flag to me to decide not to contribute.

On the other hand, a nonprofit association isn't owned by anybody; it must spend its monies for the common good as defined by its bylaws (defined as the latest version that's been reviewed and OK'd by the tax authorities), otherwise the people elected to administer it are going to have some ugly legal problems.

Forgejo makes a full break from Gitea

kleptog — Sat, 24 Feb 2024 16:14:52 +0000

Something that isn't quite clear to me, but maybe I just don't understand the US non-profit setup. Here in NL the difference between a profit and a non-profit is determined by whether dividends are paid to owners (if they exist). But that's not what's being discussed. Whether tax-deductible donations are possible is a separate distinction, but that's not what's being discussed either.

It's common here to set-up a non-profit, which has various tax-exemptions, and a wholly-owned company underneath it to handle the actual work. This is because it can be difficult for non-profits to enter certain types of financial transactions precisely because the ownership is so fuzzy.

It seems actually to be a discussion about how the projects are run, wrapped up in discussion about legal entities to make it more confusing. And it certainly seems like the creation of the company precipitated discussions about how the project was actually run.

Forgejo makes a full break from Gitea

ceplm — Sat, 24 Feb 2024 07:36:54 +0000

“Pragmatic” means “use what actually works now”. Everything else than email requires developing a new standard, negotiating among the various parties with competing interests, and development of various software components required for it. And, of course, OpenID (at least the free one, 1.0) is dead, because it was killed by the joint greed of various behemoths.

Forgejo makes a full break from Gitea

flussence — Sat, 24 Feb 2024 07:27:48 +0000

"Pragmatic" here, imo, would be having a useful amount of OpenID support. Forgejo seems to only support it as a secondary login method for an existing account which entirely defeats the point of federated identity, and it doesn't function as a provider.

It would also be a good trial run before the nuclear sledgehammer that is ActivityPub, which I imagine will unleash a spam nightmare the day it's turned on.

Not eating your gogfood?

ceplm — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 22:57:41 +0000

Gitlab is hosted on gitlab.com. The article was talking about Gitea, which is hosted on Github.

Forgejo makes a full break from Gitea

dskoll — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 22:54:14 +0000

I switched from Gitea to Forgejo shortly after the original fork. It was seamless at the time, and I guess I have a bit more confidence in Forgejo's future than Gitea's.

Not eating your gogfood?

vhns — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 22:19:19 +0000

lol, yeah

the author also mentions the irony of gitlab hosting its code in github

Forgejo makes a full break from Gitea

intelfx — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 20:38:33 +0000

> Concerning the federation, I don’t think much can beat the pragmatism of this reply by Drew DeVault <...>

I'd rather call his statement disingenuous than pragmatic.

Not eating your gogfood?

epa — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 20:22:42 +0000

The Gogs repository on GitHub

Er, sorry, what? Gogs doesn't even host itself?

Forgejo makes a full break from Gitea

ceplm — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 19:44:04 +0000

Concerning the federation, I don’t think much can beat the pragmatism of this reply by Drew DeVault (author and leader of Sourcehut) https://is.gd/5wwQy2:

> SourceHut is already federated via email. We have no intention of adding ActivityPub support at this time.