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Comment by freshhawk | Hacker News Reader

"the project that you took the first 95% of your work from"

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.

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You misunderstand my point. Yes, they have a right to and yes, that is a good and explicitly desirable thing, but there is a courtesy and tact to such things that this project lacks. They are disrespectful of their roots.

As a complete bystander there may be history I'm completely ignorant of, but in Gogs issue 1304 Unknwon themselves wrote:

"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.

Maybe I do, but I don't think so. It sounds like we just disagree on what respect/courtesy/tact is due to the original contributor to a project. I don't see the implicit hierarchy that you do. Roots are important to history and worth some kudos, but don't and shouldn't carry any power at all.

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.

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