What's been the general opinion of this change to the gitea contributors? It's difficult to match usernames to real names but I don't see overlap between the top contributors and signatories.
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”.
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
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.