Open source development is only a full time paid job for a small number of people, for everyone else it is largely driven by passion. In principal, I'm not sure anyone should tell anyone else what they are allowed to do with their free time.

But if you had taken time to read the first sentence on the link, you would see that there is in fact a key difference:

> Kallithea [...] is [...] source code management system that supports two leading version control systems, Mercurial and Git

This is something that alternatives do not do [1] [2] [3] [4]. There are likely further differences if you read the documentation at https://kallithea.readthedocs.io/en/latest/readme.html

[1] https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/458 [2] https://github.com/gogs/gogs/issues/125 [3] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/blog-posts/-/issues/261 [4] https://www.gerritcodereview.com/roadmap.html

This project has existed for mor than 6 years. It is a fork of RhodeCode, which has existed for more than a decade.

When rhodecode went closed source, Kallithea was forked, and has been maintained ever since.

> contributing time and resources to awesome open source

do you or do you just give grumpy advice how others should spend their own time?

You’re not wrong per se but this community is a place to showcase interesting technology and this is one of them.

Maybe the author just wanted to build something to practice code or to do something different than GitHub.

Innovation (and evolution) happen via mutation - it’s wrong to ask people to conform to set standards in a forum dedicated to interesting bits of knowledge.