Gitea is a fork of Gogs, the reasons for the fork are explained at https://blog.gitea.io/2016/12/welcome-to-gitea/
I really like Gogs, but it is true that while I admire @Unknwon's drive, the project needs more maintainers.
The author is also not unwilling to collaborate. Just look at the history of accepted PRs for example. However, he is unwilling to give others wider access and control over the direction of Gogs (which is totally his right):
> This happened not before trying to convince @Unknwon about giving write permissions to more people, among the community. He rightly considered Gogs his own creature and didn’t want to let it grow outside of him, thus a fork was necessary in order to set that code effectively free.
As to whether it stings I'm not sure. They had conversations around this topic and the conclusion was that a fork was what's needed for what (part of) the community wanted. Though it's possible for the original author to see this as a slap in the face I hope he sees it more as a huge testament to what he's achieved with Gogs so far.
This is how it is suppose to work, and many times BOTH projects will be stronger for it.
Prime example is the Split and then merge of NodeJS and IOJS because of that fork NodeJS is much stronger project today.
> 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). [0]
[0] https://github.com/gogits/gogs/issues/1304#issuecomment-1246...