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This announcement took the entire Gitea community by surprise, including volunteer developers contributing code daily to the project. Gitea turned from being a community led democratic project to a company that owns the domains and the trademark, overnight.

This is an even bigger problem than going open core and is begging for a fork to happen.

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Great points. I agree there will be a backlash from contributors.

As far as I can tell they don't ask contributors to hand over copyrights, but they use the permissive MIT-style licence which permits the creation of non-Free forks.

Drew DeVault, of SourceHut fame, has written on this topic. [0][1] Drew's opinion is that he probably couldn't easily turn SourceHut to the 'open core' model even if he wanted to, on account of its use of AGPL-licensed code from contributors (who retain the copyrights).

[0] https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-10-09-ip-assignment-or-lack-...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31963559

AGPL has a bad reputation because it has been weaponized against the community from companies like Elastic.

They moved from the Apache Licence 2.0 to a non-Free licence, I don't think they ever used the AGPL.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticsearch#Licensing_change...

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