Open letter to Gitea
gitea-open-letter.coding.social
gitea-open-letter.coding.social
Is this guy in fact the inventor of the annoying modern style of political documentary, where I have to listen to anxiety-inducing drones and the worst kind of movie-trailer voice, nonstop for an hour at least? The one used by shittiest propaganda tv channels? And for some inexplicable reason also borrowed by Youtube personalities that supposedly appeal to thinking, educated people in opposition to that propaganda tv.
Well you're in for a real treat with "Russia:Trauma Zone" then. Curtis listened to all the bleating criticisms and delivered six hours of absolutely bare footage, which juxtaposed and sequenced speaks for itself. The result is even more powerful than ever before - which shows that incorporating criticism, even when it's only about surface style, pays off.
The only criticism I have is that the title is a bit bland.
It should gave been called "Natasha's Boots". She is the star of the show. And in the ened she gets her boots.
> that propaganda tv
All TV and social media is propaganda. Even cat videos. It propagates. It carries a message. Even if the message is "Don't think".
There's such thing as respect for the viewer. Idk about Curtis, but the grossly manipulative style of popular political documentaries doesn't show that respect. I also don't think it's about the ‘surface’ when it's designed to tug at the emotions every second of the film.
P.S.: looked through the filmography, turns out Curtis is the author of ‘HyperNormalisation’. At least based on that I'm gonna say he does use style close-ish to what I described above: perhaps less drones, more hyperactive editing. Can't remember what the narration was like in that film, but I wasn't impressed in any positive way.
https://blog.gitea.io/2022/10/open-source-sustainment-and-th...
as discussed here:
> Since Gitea is a pure community organization without any company support, to keep the development healthy we will elect three owners every year.
> When the new owners have been elected, the old owners will give up ownership to the newly elected owners
According to CONTRIBUTING.md, this dates back to 2016. The new company represents a shift from the community model that attracted many developers and users.
The issue is that ultimately Lunny holds the trademark and isn't legally bound to uphold whatever agreement is stated in the repo.
What was done is morally unacceptable. But that can be easily fixed. Just give it all back!
Drama like this is God's way of teaching hippies why we have contract law.
It seems like the demands are:
> Implementing an intuitive and fair election process.
I think we do that now: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#... Anyone who has contributed to the gitea project more than 2x PRs is invited to be a maintainer. Every maintainer gets 3 votes. Maybe there are some suggestions for improving - please open a PR.
> Describing the ways in which democratic decisions are to be made.
Again, I'm just confused what's being requested. Moving on.
> Providing accessible places where all relevant information can be found.
This seems like the same request as above. Or maybe a request for better documentation. I agree. Open a PR, don't fork gitea.
> Establishing a DoOcracy that works and continue to improve it.
I agree with this and I suspect that was the intention with the original reference to DAOs, but needs to be clarified.
> A non-profit organisation owned by the Gitea community is created. > The Gitea trademark and domains are transferred to the non-profit. > The name of the company is changed to avoid any confusion with the non-profit.
Does anyone have experience with how this is typically handled? It seems like this is the only actionable request. What are some examples of non-profit open-source companies? Is that typical?
The Apache foundation? FSF? The Mozilla foundation (which is different but related to the for-profit Mozilla Corporation)? The rust foundation? CNCF? Probably many others.
It would also probably be possible to find a suitable existing non-profit that could act as a steward of these resources.
> A non-profit organisation owned by the Gitea community is created.
> The Gitea trademark and domains are transferred to the non-profit.
> The name of the company is changed to avoid any confusion with the non-profit.
A week ago the Gitea project was an informal community trusting elected individuals with essential assets such as the domains and the trademark. They had a clear moral bound (see https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#...) to pass on the ownership of the project to their successor.
But they thought it was ok to create a company and take the domains and trademark as if they were their property. Maybe the absence of a legal bound made them forget their promise, their moral obligation towards the Gitea community.
Creating a non-profit will avoid that kind of problem in the future and give back the domains and the trademark to the Gitea community. If the president of a non-profit was to transfer the domain name to a for-profit company they exclusively control, the members of the non profit will be in a position to sue the president for embezzlement.
If the for profit company refuses to give back the domains and trademark, that would be very damaging to the project. The post from Harald Welte on that topic in the Gitea forum is enlightening in that regard, see https://discourse.gitea.io/t/open-source-sustainment-and-the...
The other points you cite from the Open Letter are merely suggestions for future improvements (as stated in the letter), not demands.
This rubs me the wrong way. Surely the discussion history, documentation, and the freaking code are more important than the name.
I generally don't like open source becoming beholden to comercial interests, and I don't know enough about this story to know if that's really what is happening here. Reading that the name may be more important than the code is just very off-putting.
https://medium.com/swlh/hudson-is-retiring-the-end-of-a-jenk...
Emphasis mine. I think that's a defensible statement about names/trademarks for any project that's gained meaningful traction, and Open- vs. Libre-Office is an apt illustration of that.
I quickly accepted LibreOffice as "the new OpenOffice". It happens all the time, MariaDB is the new MySQL, uBlock Origin is the new uBlock, etc...
I expect that if Gitea messes up, the community will quickly fork and the fork will overcome the original. And considering the scope of the tool. For people who install and manage Gitea instances, keeping up to date with the tech world is often part of their job, so I don't expect a name change to be such a big deal. Gitea users are typically developers, which I hope are tech savvy enough not to be thrown off by a change in logo (assuming the instance is not rebranded).
And this is for a case where the overlords of the old name have done fuck all with it - imagine how the situation would be if someone with more interest and marketing sense than the Apache Software Graveyard would have gained control of the name.
Yes, but there's the crux. Gitea Ltd having the domains and trademark and then setting project direction means exactly that. While before it appeared or pretended to be a fully community-driven exercise. If you are not part of the company, how can you still considered to be a community-elected Owner that acts as the project's custodian?
The only thing that is unique to an open source project is its reputation, and the reputation is most strongly tied with its name and trademarks.
That's not quite right: trademarks are different to copyright. Most open source licenses grant a copyright licenses, but not the trademark.
Over a decade ago there was a kerfuffle when Mozilla didn't approve of Debian's Firefox patchset and asserted that Debian couldn't use the name "Firefox" for the (still licensed for redistribution) source code Debian had. They had the rights to use, modify and redistribute the Firefox code - but not the name. For a while, the Mozilla browser was known as "IceWeasel" on Debian and Debian variants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_software_rebranded_by_...
gitea is a brand. whoever owns the domain and trademarks owns the brand.
Trademarks can be a burden to FLOSS.
This open letter had to be published even if it has little chance to be effective. It would be horribly wrong for something like that to happen in a Free Software project without offering a simple and gentle way to do right.
Ultimately it is quite possible the only solution will be a fork. And as the Gogs fork showed, it only takes a handful of motivated developers to succeed.
The people doing all the work are "stealing" from the "community" that contributes much less? If someone wants to fork here, it seems like they would also need to step up the amount of contributions they're doing if the people currently doing the work are the ones organizing a way to make some money to pay for their time.
Or I mean even Gitea has been on the other side of this, while the Gitea contributors _were_ gogs contributors pre-fork, they were not the largest.
2. The reassurance that Gitea would be a stable platform to build on without having to compromise between the open source project and a commercial variant
The general consensus from us maintainers on the "Open Letter" is that it's an overreaction. It's not supported by a vast majority of the maintainers of the project and spearheaded by folks who have contributed very little. A VAST majority of folks contributing to gitea are still onboard.
We need answers. The communication was poorly handled.
The original announcement was completely bereft of details and now we finally have a draft of updated clarifications that should be posted soon (thankfully, this time we're being consulted for feedback).
I think the original intention was "we're seeing some revenue coming in and now we're workshopping ways to get those funds back to contributors and maintain the project in a sustainable way", but a lot of poorly-chosen words were used, and panic ensued.
TL;DR: give us some time to set it all straight and if it really looks like incentives are misaligned, please provide some constructive criticism.
ALSO, WE WOULD LOVE HELP & FEEDBACK FROM FOLKS WHO HAVE MAINTAINED SIMILAR PROJECTS SUCCESSFULLY
Maintainers are the people who are involved reasonably consistently for the long term, and also do the un-sexy work of tracking down the (sometimes difficult) bugs people report, triage the (unclear) issues people report, deal with generic support requests, and all of that.
I feel that here you demonstrate some of the improvements that can be made to the project. This stance shows that the view on what constitutes the Community around the project is quite narrow: Contribute a lot of code and you matter. Commits + LoC or be silent.
While that is a logical perspective and how many FOSS projects look upon community, it neglects all the people in different roles that have a warm heart for the project and do activities that may be less visible than that. Like taking time to advocate the project across the web wherever they can. Or those working in a broader ecosystem in other projects where you indirectly benefit. Codeberg is an example who maintain a downstream fork, and where people like Otto Richter act like delegated maintainers and handling a lot of user feedback. Or the group of projects involved in forge federation, that did the brunt work where Gitea benefits tremendously [0].
The announcement of Gitea Ltd and the follow-up with the Open Letter did a lot of good in that respect. For the first time there's broader open discussion on strategical aspects and long-term project direction where many of the community have their say. Though the open letter only gives indications of the kinds of community project improvements that can be made, these last couple of days a ton of feedback has been posted on how these could actually be shaped.
… it’ll be top late for anyone to do anything about it?
If you’re not trying to capitalize on the community project then simply follow the demands. Put the name and domain in a non-profit and run your company on the side. If your insentives turn out to misallign, or your CEO decides to sell the company to Microsoft just to have the en shut everything down, the community loses nothing except of the current model you’ve proposed where they lose pretty much everything because your plan was just “trust us bros”.
https://communitywiki.org/wiki/DoOcracy
(If you're like me and hadn't heard of the concept before.)
> In a meritocracy, the most qualified people for a job are selected for that job. In a do-ocracy, whoever does the job gets it, no matter how well they’re qualified.
> Meritocracy: In a meritocracy, the most qualified people for a job are selected for that job. In a do-ocracy, whoever does the job gets it, no matter how well they’re qualified.
I'd add that "merit" is a less useful concept to construct an organization around than "doing". Merit is impossible to measure, and every measure prone both to being gamed and to unfairly underestimating people and shutting them out, but is also the wrong thing to optimize for. The thing you want to optimize for is the work being, and for the overall effort to result in a high quality end product. Most parts of a given project aren't particularly critical and it doesn't matter who does them as long as they're done. If a particular part of the project is struggling, then the problem is that they needs support, not that they have "insufficient merit;" taking the unnecessary moral component out of it makes it easier to see what the problem is and to organize the resources to solve it. If some role is sensitive and requires special qualifications, that's an exception that can be dealt with as it arises (and if you're in a problem space where that's the rule and not the exception, fair enough, perhaps this isn't the approach for you).
I've not been in an organization that labeled itself a "DoOcracy", but it sounds like it's potentially less political and more productive than meritocracy.
"Why did you punch me in the face?"
"Shut up, it was free. I do all this work for free and you ungrateful parasite users just complain."
Is Joe part of the incorporated company?
Folks who are not happy about this should just switch back to Gogs.
As a WEIRD myself, I am heavily invested in the social concepts around F/OSS and GPL, and have super hard time with the vibe coming from PRC. Those implications are beyond the scope of this topic though, for the most part. better info welcome
- DarkAudacity, was mostly a fork by Audacity's own lead dev for experimenting on things which might be too disruptive or polarising for the main project, that ended up being largely reincorporated in Audacity
- After acquiring the project, Muse Group drafted a proposal to add invasive telemetry and age restrictions, this led to a few forks and ultimately a reversal of course; soon after the privacy policy changed to add notes about personal data extraction to Russia and the USA, there was more outcry and this was reverted as well
And even after that won't the company itself have to start putting telemetry and stuff themselves since prexisting maintainers definately won't do that. It feels pretty much like a Hostile takeover than acquiring. How do they even benefit from it
And to an extent Emacs (Xemacs), although the relationship there is more complicated.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Compiler_Collection#EGCS_f...
Although people secretly created the company month ago, the first public hint of its existence showed when someone inadvertently mentioned being bound by an NDA. Which raised questions that they could not answer... because they were bound by an NDA.
That was in July 2022.
They're just going to form a for-profit based on his work and cut him out entirely?
My understanding is the point of free software is that you can do (almost) anything you want with it, including sell it.
I guess I'd expect this document to better substantiate why being elected puts this duty on these people, and why that claim is more significant than if I elected the author of this letter as Viceroy of Bringing Me Lunch?
https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#... https://blog.gitea.io/2022/10/open-source-sustainment-and-th...
If so, this seems like a reminder of why the GPL and its variants are important.
https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/pull/18165
The migration bundles all of that up so I assume the holdup is writing something that can covert that archive to something Gitea understands or can use.
Update: Looking at your comment history, you seem to be a 'damage control' account, created at the announcement of Gitea Ltd. I call that bad faith pur sang.
Time to walk away and let it burn if that is the case.
If you're not the in the top producers in a DoOcracy then you neglected your right to exert influence in the direction of the project.
I've led a few larger projects and the rate at which the least of us will have the biggest opinions about who is -owed- what is flabbergasting.
DoOcracy's are great, but they often flame out with the top contributor finding one day they have a self-appointed board of directors for a passion-project that they just wanted to share with the world.
Gitea is a self-labeled "DoOcracy". nobody owes an apology. forking is inherent to open source methodology. ideological conflicts help nobody but those who lead them. the fact is that the work is done by few, and those few have decided to exercise their rights in open source to do what is their prerogative.
There's a whole bunch of contributors to this project, who've never been informed. Even maintainers were caught by surprise as only some marginal bits of info were apparently spread.
A project creating CONTRIBUTING guidelines, then Owners not honoring them? Effectively just pretending to be a community-driven project. Probably legally the ones incorporating have done nothing wrong. And culture, norms don't count in business world. But they do in free software community.
Yes, a fork may be in order. But technically this could still be mended and things be put right.
The current holder of the domains and trademarks was elected as the custodian for a limited time (through the end of 2022). The terms of that election included an agreement to hand over custody to their eventual elected successor. But they've instead created this for-profit company and transferred it ownership of the assets.
What happens when a new custodian is elected by the community who is not affiliated with this new company? Will the company give up control of the assets as previously agreed?
But others often choose open comms before heavy action, and many contributors would support that.
And yes, "forking" is subjectively a heavier action to some ppl. It's subjective, for sure. To each their own, I guess :)
Respectfully, I'm not one who would take or support your advice to act earlier (and such is my right)
While a simple personal fork of a repository/codebase is not very aggressive, forking a community (or attempting to) is a pretty significant step that will almost always create drama and bad feelings.
Working to communicate and resolve issues before attempting a fork of the community is always a good idea since they should be avoided when possible.
While the owners of an open source project absolutely have the legal rights to do as they wish, if those owners are interested in maintaining a community around their project, it behooves them to listen to that community, especially to those who have put their own time and effort into that project and community.
It's not as end-all-questions as a lot of people seem to think. It's the kind of thing people say who just find caring about anyone else's concerns about bad behavior annoying and wish for a way to shut them up and and also green light their own bad dehavior.
One problem with doocracy is it not only doesn't care who does something, it also doesn't care what the holy doer does.
DoOcracy is no valid excuse for being a dick.
"Why did you punch me in the face?"
"Shut up, it was free."
It seems utterly exhausting to be involved
The only difference between open source community and private ones is that the discussion ("the social drama") tends to be done out in the open for everyone to see in the open source ones, while in the private ones it happens behind closed doors or between individuals behind peoples back.
For example, it seems you never saw any of the news about how the Python community calmly and carefully discussed what they were going to do to move forward after Guido resigned as BDFL?
This is entirely explained by survivorship bias. The matural social interactions which are the bread and butter of open source never bubble up to your purview because they aren't dramatic and interesting.
This is engineering/technical communities in general. You get a lot of strong opinions and individuals who cannot take criticism. A few, often very loud, people make a ton of noise and take up the time of the individuals actually contributing real substance to the project.
Don't like it? Fork it. Simple as that. Same with all the code of conduct nonsense that crops up a couple times a year.
If your opinions are so popular forking and moving contributors to a new project should be easy right? Yeah, turns out your opinions aren't shared by most and only the loudest of the group, no one else really cares.
That's because open source washes its dirty laundry in public. The same things happen behind closed doors in companies all the time, it's called office politics, and yes, it is exhausting.
Our biology seeks power and influence. Rent seeking.
Stop giving it to these ephemeral terms, logos, memes, and importing the gibberish of outsiders, giving them influence.
Don’t give them anymore attention, fork the repo. The people behind these projects are just people. They’re not owed fealty and chance after chance given this behavior happens all the time and users complain all the time when they do. Stop feeding the identity of the sorts who do this. They’re figurative nobodies and random meat bags of billions. Treat them with the same lack of respect in return. There’s no making nice with this kind of agency. Flip it off and walk away.
Tellingly, it never appears to be the ones who do the actual work who throw such tantrums.
And how about just extending the benefit of the doubt instead of immediately feeding the outrage machine?
And how do you know that, if I may ask?
You give them an inch, they’ll take a mile.
Writing them to resolve this issue in good faith, is giving them the benefit of the doubt.
So I think the entire doc as a first step in supposed good communication is in bad faith. Bringing this out into the public, and being on the front page of HN makes it seem like a stunt, and for pressure, not a good faith plea. I feel like a private conversation between the concerned parties should have happened first, and if it did that should have been mentioned. If that didn't work then maybe make it public for pressure, and then fork (and or consider legal action to get the trademarks if there's grounds idk not a lawyer).
If people's idea of good first step communication is to create a public letter with accusatory undertones and get it plastered places, I don't want to work with those people. They went from 0mph to 120mph way too quickly.
With a dispersed community that used to work in public, against the company owners who secretly prepared this since at least March this year (likely longer) and not even informed their own maintainers properly in the private channel they have for that.
And if the situation actually is as nefarious as you say it is, with communication having broken down, the letter should have called that out directly instead of being wishy washy. If people feel that strongly about it not being a mistake, time to use strong language and lay out all the facts.
Indeed, most of the community isn't easily reached. Hence the open letter and the ability to sign. I see the open letter as an invitation to have these conversations. But this time according to community processes and in the open.
I recognize at least 2 names in the top five as devs that I personally collaborated with in order to add features to Gitea.