That's his prerogative. Learn patience. Not all PRs have to be merged on your schedule. As a FOSS maintainer myself this sort of behavior sickens me and reeks of entitlement. Gogs is worse off for your involvement.
Forking is not a decision to be taken lightly. Even the most just fork will fracture the community and weaken the software's development. Contributors are now being asked to take sides and both sides are getting fewer contributions. The stress this puts on the original maintainers is also non-trivial.
Look at ffmpeg/libav. It forked for similar reasons on the surface, but in reality it was to forcibly take control of the vernerable project over petty disagreements. For years the users and developers suffered alike as libav was shipped by default in Debian due to politics and received subpar workmanship and more security vulnerabilities that were fixed on slower schedules, all while taking contributors and users away from ffmpeg. After nearly a decade libav is finally dead in the water and ffmpeg is becoming the default on Debian again, but not after lots and lots of damage to the project.
On the other hand, you have examples like nodejs/iojs, where there were much more tangible reasons and alternative solutions were explored longer and more earnestly, and they regretfully were forced to fork for the good of the ecosystem. And they were right, eventually the two projects merged together under better oversight.
But the gitea folks do not have nearly as much clout behind their efforts IMO, and as a result their move to fork is extremely harmful to gogs development.
Considering how fast GitLab is moving, if Gogs/Gitea wants to remain relevant, they really have to move at a much faster pace than they use to. Judging by Unknwon's comment in this issue
https://github.com/gogits/gogs/issues/1304
it seems like Gogs is driven by a passion and it doesn't matter at the end if he is the only user. As he puts it
> Gogs isn't a business, making it is what I love to do
I'm not sure if his stance has changed, since this issue was from July. I'm also not sure, if he fully realizes he is sitting on a potential golden goose. The market for Git hosting in Enterprise is still very much up for grabs.
Gogs is written in Go, easy to install, light on features and is lightning fast.
Gitlab is mostly Ruby (with some Go), a mess to install, heavy on features, and (at least gitlab.com) extremely slow.
I don't see how they compete at all.
As you point out, you either go with fast vs feature rich.
GitLab is working towards making things faster and easier to install. Is Gogs/Gitea working towards making it more feature rich?
If Gogs market are hobbyist who want to run it on a Raspberry PI, then I don't see GitLab being a threat. If Gogs wants to be solution that larger companies would consider using, then they are going to have to compete with GitLab's, which means introducing more features.
This Gitea fork appears to be a desire to move faster with more features. I've posted this in another response, but this a diff from the point of divergent to the latest commit for each master branch.
Gogs (69 commits with 106 diffs):
https://gitsense.com/gogs-gitea/gogs-diff.png
Gitea (528 commits with 2,062 diffs):
https://gitsense.com/gogs-gitea/gitea-diff.png
I obviously haven't gone through a lot of the diffs, but the changes appear to be formatting/commenting like this:
https://gitsense.com/gogs-gitea/gitea-changes-example1.png
with others adding more functionality like this:
https://gitsense.com/gogs-gitea/gitea-changes-example2.png
No matter what, it looks like there maybe no turning back for both groups. Hopefully this is not the case.
This issue was updated this morning with a plan to speed things up: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/947
The maintainer cares about code quality, it seems like gitea does not
He can't expect others to not want to push for greater git mindshare. Gogs is licensed under mit and he has absolutely no say in how others want to evovle it. This is how permissive licenses work.
To expand on the goose metaphor, attempts to extract additional value from a goose that lays golden eggs oftentimes kills the goose: I'm sure a few years ago some VCs looked at CyanogenMod and saw loads of potential, but here we are.
It's perfectly fine for Gitea to evolve or even monetize via Gitea Inc, but it will continue to compete with Gogs if the maintainer wills.
The project that explicitly donated its code to the public to use and re-purpose as it saw fit you mean?
I got confused by the use of the word "took". And that you seem upset that other contributors get to choose how they want to contribute, even if the originator disagrees. So they are volunteering wrong? Or Hobbying wrong? Glad you can set them straight.
There are plenty of systems of generating code where the creator retains these rights and things are organized in a top down hierarchical manner. These are what FOSS license are explicitly fighting against.
"In my point of view, it's a sign of success of Gogs that Gitea forked it. Gogs is under MIT license and there is no problem with me totally that Gitea is developing its own version. It happens often in open source community(when you are not satisfied with upstream version, I fork a lot actually)."
In the same issue comment Unknwon also states that they believe Gogs and Gitea to have fundamental philosophical differences, and finishes off with thanking everyone and wishing happy coding.
I don't know all the facts and Unknwon's personal view may have changed in last 18 months, but just judging by the philosophy of the original author and maintainer of Gogs the lack of courtesy, tact and respect of their roots that you refer to might be an opinion of yours that Unknwon doesn't share. If that is so, then what do you mean they lack courtesy, tact and respect towards?
Of course, if I'm mistaken or there are more recent opinions of Unknwon's that contradict this, then please disregard this comment.
One faction of developers parted ways with another faction because they disagree on direction, in this case the minority faction has the rights to the name. We get a choice, they all get to donate their work to the public as they wish to.
This is unintuitive to our ape brains, but it is objectively better to remove ego and status concerns from collaborative projects.
Sure. 100%. It's up to him for how he wants to run an OSS project.
In the same way, if people in the community have different ideas they're more than welcome to fork. If you don't want that to happen, either listen more to the community or don't open source a project.