A Message from Lunny on Gitea Ltd. and the Gitea Project | Hacker News Reader

A Message from Lunny on Gitea Ltd. and the Gitea Project

blog.gitea.io

106 pointsfariszr90 comments

> As it continued to grow, I additionally trademarked the name “Gitea” in order to protect the project’s brand. (More on the trademark later.)

...

> I have also transferred both the domains and trademarked name to Gitea Ltd. so that they are no longer personally owned by me and will remain indefinitely with the Gitea project.

(no further mention of trademarks)

So, I think the take away here is as a response to the core demands of the 'open letter' being:

- 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.

The answer is bluntly; no.

With regard to the concerns raised about use use of a DAO, the response is (as previously):

> One of the options we have been considering includes a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). ... The DAO management model would also not mean the creation of a gitcoin or crypto token.

So, basically no acknowledgement that using a DAO is fundamentally indistinguishable from using crypto.

A pretty ho-hum response, in my personal opinion.

Well, it is what it is.

Why use the term DAO when it is essentially everyone has a vote ? I would think a COOp would be a better choice of words. Using a DAO would give negative connotations when you aren’t issuing a token .

It's not "everyone has a vote". Some have more voting powers than others: "provides contributors with greater participation to have more votes"

Typically you can expect Gitea Ltd. employees to have greater participation.

I recently learned what a DAO is and I simply don't understand what purpose a "decentralized autonomous organization" could serve here. What am I missing? Python, FreeBSD, Debian etc etc have foundations/boards, hold elections and make decisions without anything so complex.

A DAO is much more like a cooperative. The complexity comes from the value distribution and vote models.

That said, you don't need crypto for that, just well made processes.

It's really a shame that an entire category of software and organizational practices have been smeared because of "the crypto phenomenon".

Welcome to the trough of disillusionment. It will pass.

"Smart contracts" are a defining feature of DAOs. "Smart contracts" are not something that are offered outside of cryptocurrency / blockchain platforms. No one has found a viable use for blockchains that cannot be better solved in other means except as massive vehicles for scams.

Any organization that tries to implement a DAO / smart contract system for governance is asking for trouble, because they’re legally unsound and untested.

As far as organizational structures are concerned, there are plenty of viable structures and legal sorts of entities that can be used. (Gitea Ltd might be able to fix a lot of the goodwill issues by switching to a B corp structure or even to a legal cooperative structure.)

Then just make a cooperative organization. There are legal means for doing so in most jurisdictions. There’s absolutely no need to use a term that makes no sense without cryptoscams and hackable "smart" contracts.

This premise of a DAO is that votes are the only thing that ultimately matter, which can make things simpler. Something gets presented as a course of action, a vote happens, and the if enough votes qualify you make the action. In a crypto DAO, this voting is implemented in the blockchain's software rules as a contract; thus, it is completely automated. Sometimes, to the dismay of the users. But, there is nothing requiring you to do this in software. It just means they want, in theory, that you'll somehow be able to have a vote without being required to be known or involved directly.

If the DAO isn't implemented in software using smart contracts, then what is the difference with a "traditional" foundation like e.g. Debian or Python have?

> The answer is bluntly; no.

I share the same conclusion. It is time to fork.

> time to fork.

Knew you'd come around. Now I just need Rapnie from the other day to put their blessing on it and we can call this a done deal.

"Gitea Ltd. will be open to building special versions for special clients and will contribute any features back to the main repository when possible" pretty much means that they won't contribute back everything. That's what you get when contributing to MIT licensed code.

The way I read it is "company x has some internal system that they want to integrate with gitea" Where it may not make sense to contribute it back.

You make it sound like people contributing to MIT licensed code are oblivious to that. I'm perfectly fine with anyone doing whatever they want or I wouldn't have chosen MIT. They don't owe me anything.

Fair enough. The initial reaction to the company creation still makes me think that in this case, some community contributors feel like they got the short end of the stick. Clearly not the sketchiest part of these events, but maybe food for thought when considering contributing to a project that may go commercial at some point.

It can be taken as complaining but I see it as they are just trying the civil communication route before doing something like a gpl fork that's all. It's the opposite of unreasonable or bad behavior.

You can do the same thing with GPL-licensed code. Only the recipient of GPL-ed code has a right to get the source code, not the public at large. Unless the recipient wants to redistribute the code, Copyleft makes little difference.

Copyleft makes all the difference.

In the case of server-side components, yes. That's why the AGPL exists

But the people on internet told me MIT means more freedom than GNU coz you can do more things with code! /s

It's pretty much signal it will go open core the moment someone makes something that can be sold to corpo as a feature

With GPL, source code only needs to be shared to the parties the software is distributed to.

A company-internal software can have as much GPL as they want, they don't need to publish any source code. So yeah, MIT and GPL would have exactly the same outcome.

> But the people on internet told me MIT means more freedom than GNU coz you can do more things with code! /s

Why /s? You literally and unironically can do more things with permissive code than copyleft. Amongst those things are "incorporate it into proprietary software" and "make a closed-source fork or distribution". That's the point.

to be honest I don't even want SAP integration in my gitea

But on a serious note: this whole thing is kind of a PR disaster which could have been avoided with better communication

Context, last few days here:

Open Letter to Gitea:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33372471

Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33339421

> I created Gitea

No mention of Gogs anywhere, really classy.

(Gitea is a fork of Gogs)

Probably not the wisest time to mention the concept of forking.

Or their previous system based on voting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33373254

Which is STILL in the repo's README: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#...

2 of the 3 current owners agreed with this, so it was democratic.

Arguably. There was no process outlined to change the process. In most democracies, the leader can't change to a non-democracy just because he is currently the leader.

Sure they can and we've seen examples in Africa and elsewhere like Germany in the 30s. We have also seen the way Russia pretends a democracy exists and promos voting while jailing opposition party leaders. I would say most democracies around the world are propped up by a strong military not the strong will of the people for democracy

Are you taking Nazi Germany as a example of what one can do?

One example..

Democracies succumbing to coups is a democratic process like dying is a life process. It's something the system is prone to doing sure, but after that, it is no longer the same system. To put it another way, eggs are prone to being made into omelettes, but after you do so, it is no longer an egg, and it is no longer capable of becoming a chicken; once you pervert a democracy, it is no longer a democracy, and is no longer capable of representing the people.

There's a sort of "reverse no true Scotsman" happening here because of a confusion of terms which creates the illusion of a contradiction. The claim was, "it is undemocratic for leaders to change the system in an anti-democratic way, despite being elected;" this is a claim about how democracies ought to work. Your counterclaim was, "this has happened historically in democracies" - a true claim about history, but these claims are not actually in contradiction and indeed both of them are true. Like how if I said, "cars drive on four wheels," it wouldn't be a contradiction for if you showed me a car which had three wheels because it had lost one in an accident.

"Democracy is like a tram. You ride it until you arrive at your destination, then you step off." - Recep Tayyip Erdogan

A voting solely by owners is not a democracy, it's an idiocracy (from the Greek ιδιοκτήτης, owner).

(yes, the more accurate word would be titocracy, from the Greek root κτήτο-, but where's the fun in that?)

I interpret that as "I created the Gitea project" not I have written Gitea from scratch.

It can be technically accurate and distasteful at the same time. I would expect at least a nod to gogs in “our beginnings”.

> Gitea was created by Lunny Xiao, who was also a founder of the self-hosted Git service Gogs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitea

Gogs is a clone of GitHub and GitLab (which were both originally written in Ruby with the Ruby on Rails CoC Convention-over-Configuration Web Framework), which were built because Trac didn't support Git or multiple projects, Sourceforge didn't support Git or on-prem, and git patchbombs as attachments over emailing lists needed Pull Requests, and Issues and PRs should pull from the same sequence of autoincrement (*) integer keys.

- You can do ~GitHub Pages with Gitea and an idempotent git post-receive-hook that builds static HTML from a repo revision, tests, deploys to revid/ and updates a latest/ symlimk, and logs; or with HTTP webhooks.

- "Feature: Allow interacting with tickets via email" https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/2386#issuecomment-6...

- It's not safe to host Gitea on the same server as the CI (e.g. DroneCI) host if you grant permissions to the docker socket to the CI container: you need another VM at least to run the CI controller and workers on_push() with Gitea. https://docs.drone.io/server/provider/gitea/ :

> Please note we strongly recommend installing Drone on a dedicated instance. We do not recommend installing Drone and Gitea on the same machine due to network complications, and we definitely do not recommend installing Drone and Gitea on the same machine using docker-compose.

GitHub and GitLab centralize git for project-based collaboration, which is itself a distributed system.

It seems like they're being deliberately obtuse regarding the DAO.

If it really is decoupled from anything financial, then how do they decide who gets what voting weight? Presumably, by manually assigning weights to people (instead of it being weighted based on the size of their financial stake). If some central authority decides the voting weights, how is it still a DAO? (I think that would actually be a reasonable system, since it negates the need for any crypto bullshit, but it seems silly/misleading to call it a DAO at that point)

I can't really decipher their true motives here, but either it will be a financial instrument, or it will only provide the illusion of decentralised decision-making.

I like to think of a DAO as an organisation that is unkillable because there is no central control.

A centrally managed one sounds like a cooperative with more open policy.

Earnest question; is unkillability a desirable quality in a system? Put another way, is it responsible to engineer a machine that has no off switch?

>Throughout the life of the project, I have always personally owned both domains. As it continued to grow, I additionally trademarked the name “Gitea” in order to protect the project’s brand. (More on the trademark later.)

The issue as I read it is that he communicated to the community that he isn't the BDFL (benevolent dictator for life) of the project but rather that there is democratic ownership.

>https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#...

Clearly that's not the case. Communities can be mostly fine with a BDFL system if it's made clear however they tend to be less fine with feeling like they've been lied to.

I will work with signatories of the Gitea Open Letter to start a fork and update the progress daily at https://gitea-open-letter.coding.social/updates/

I hope you & the rest of the community will consider writing a detailed postmortem. I take from some of your comments that there has been a series of issues which has culminated in this schism. As someone who has (currently stealth mode) open source projects they'd like to release with a similar model, with a commercial entity supporting a broader community project, I'd appreciate understanding what I should take from this in structuring my project. I don't think I'm alone in that.

Godot has a similar structure. The engine is MIT licensed, it's a member project of the Software Freedom Conservancy and one of the lead developers has a company that does Switch and PlayStation ports. The only difference between this and Gitea that I see is who owns the trademarks or whatever (SFC vs the gitea company), and everyone's fine with the way things run in Godot.

Compare Godot's governance page (https://godotengine.org/governance) with this blog post and the previous one. Godot's governance page indicates, clearly, that Godot is owned by the community and SFC is empowered to ensure that happens. There's no acknowledgement of the existence of W4Games (who are also not called Godot Engine Ltd), much less any governance role. This makes W4Game's position as "just one consulting company amongst many" which is much more palatable. If W4 wanted to take Godot to an open core or visible source model then, it would have to fork, despite containing the lead developers.

The worry here is that Gitea Limited will be in the same position as ElasticSearch in a few years and they've given no structural roadblocks against that while dropping community leadership for commercial leadership

Or maybe just cool down a little and give them the chance to clarify things? From reading the discord, this really doesn’t sound like a hostile takeover but well intentions with bad wording.

Reading between the lines, I don’t see anything in this message that implies this is a hostile takeover. It seems like Lunny envisions the Gitea Ltd as an additional assets of the Gitea community. That is, there’s no mention of what is happening to the voting system. It’s possible the current democratic voting system will remain in place, and that if Lunny is voted out, he will voluntary transfer ownership of the LTD to the new owner. The comments are acting like that is not the case but I don’t see anything indicating that.

The communication around this issue is very poor. I’m choosing to apply Occam’s Razor here and assume that Lunny doesn’t understand how other open source projects are run or what the differences between a non-profit and an LTD are (or what a DOA is). Rather than assume that this is an attempt to turn Gitea into a corporate-owned, profit-generating, machine.

It at least 50% doesn't matter if the undesirable actions are the result of honest ignorance. They are still undesirable, and he is now being informed. I don't think there was really any excuse in the first place but definitely now there is none at all, and the non-response validates exactly the open letter's complaints.

Saying "What's the big deal? I don't see the problem." proves the problem. (Lunny I mean)

Something which hasn't been discussed much in this kerfuffle is the role that copyleft can play in protecting projects from this kind of problem. The MIT license is the "default" for many people but it's honestly pretty irresponsible to use it without thinking these cases through.

I represent a similar project (which I shall leave unnamed) and we use copyleft licenses without asking for a copyright assignment from contributors. The result is that the project's copyright is legally held by its contributors and each one licenses their work to everyone else under copyleft terms, requiring everyone involved to commit to keeping it free and open source. Even the project leadership, as it were, is not allowed to take the code and run off with it. Changing the license would involve getting each contributor to agree to a new license, or rewriting the contributions from anyone who does not agree.

As the saying goes: show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome. Design your incentives with care to achieve the desired outcomes. If you make something valuable without considering this, someone will eventually try to take advantage of that value without you.

Copyleft has very little to do with this. The authors of a permissively licensed project keep their copyright as well, and nothing stops you from taking over a GPL-licensed project as a company as long as it stays open source. Copyleft only stops someone from distributing changes as closed source.

>as long as it stays open source

This is the important part.

> Copyleft only stops someone from distributing changes as closed source.

Which is all we wanted?

The original Open Letter was only about domains and trademarks.

> Copyleft only stops someone from distributing changes as closed source.

That "only" is the important part. Having to change label attached to it is annoying, but copyleft is crucial

Push for MIT/BSD licenses can be pretty much shortened to corporations wanting to use some work for free and by proxy developers wanting to make their corporate job easier.

Which would be fine if not that they usually use disgusting rhetoric like trying to argue it's somehow less "free" to have license disallowing taking the freedoms away.

I chose MIT/BSD licences long before any corporation hired me.

The GNU GPL is a fine licence (if you want tit-for-tat licensing, which I DO NOT) with a godawful unremovable political rant attached at the top. Fork the licence to remove the rant and it’s incompatible with the GNU GPL.

Plus, I literally do not care what people do with the small libraries that I write. If I were making something bigger…I might have a different opinion.

Where exactly is the kerfuffle here? Is the crux of the issue that the community thought it owned the trademark when in fact it was owned by the initial creator?

Whether contributors fork or not, the code is MIT licensed, anyone can start a consulting organization around a piece of MIT code.

What is Lunny absconding with here?

idk if he bought the domains and trademarks with his own name and also is the creator of Gitea, what’s the open source community is bitching about? It’s time we stop expecting things for free, devs need to get paid

This is people in the open source community trying to decide whether the name "Gitea" is now spoiled for their purposes, and whether to fork the toys into a different sandbox. Nobody is really saying the Gitea people cannot do what they seem to be doing; people are just making their own plans, in reaction.

I'm not that pessimist regarding the announcement, even though it makeup me a little bit suspicious. Still looking forward to the federation/ActivityPub support.

Looks like Gitea will get forked.

I look forward to a new name. Gitea always sounded awful.

As a non-native English speaker, I never know how to pronounce it. I know it's supposed to be git-tea but in my head it's more git-eh-ah.

As a native English speaker I'm just now realizing the same.

I'm a native English speaker and luckily I've never found the need to pronounce gitea. In my head, it'll randomly either be "git-tea" or "git-e-ah".

Do they have pronunciation guide? Thought it's just gi-tea

They do, it's the first question in the FAQ. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EM71-2uDAoY

I've been following the story all morning and only now just realized it's tea like the beverage.

Why? It stays open source, not open core, and they will provide consulting and bespoke changes for paying customers.

> Gitea Ltd. will be open to building special versions for special clients and will contribute any features back to the main repository when possible

This gives no guarantee that everything in these "special versions" is contributed back. Might as well just say "Open Core". If that's not the case then this needs additional clarification.

I didn't read this as open core.

The previous point from the quote was that the project remains MIT. The following point was that contracts favorable to those conditions would also be preferred and recommended.

At sounds like some contracts might need bespoke functionality to me.

The previous blog post is more explicit and reads Open Core:

> An enhanced enterprise version

But that's a general problem with these two blog posts. They leave much to interpretation. Except for one thing: Gitea Ltd is in control of the domains & the trademark and won't give them back. The days of a community led project are gone. Just like that.

It will be a pleasure to welcome you in the upcoming fork. Wouldn't you like to participate in a democratic Free Software project instead of working for free and help VC make tons of money?

Except the community never really owned them, it was only Lunny who did. He could have at any point used his ownership of these things against the community. The situation hasn't changed much in that regard except that I guess everyone trusts Lunny the person more than this ltd he's created.

> we began creating a more formalized operating model so that Gitea could earn funding through public donations, selling Gitea merchandise, and receiving paid commercial contributions.

This sounds in light of recent events like he’s saying “we faked having a community driven operating model despite myself retaining full control, so we could live up to requirements by diners and commercial supporters”.

It seems resonable that he surrender trademark and domain despite him having acquired it personally as it should rightfully belong to the community that the diners and companies sponsored. They where not giving him personally money and they where not giving money under the assumption that it would go towards him starting a company that would take control of everything.

So one can now say gitea, is no longer his cup of tea.

call the fork gitcafe

Gitmate (much stronger) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mate_(drink)

Gitbawls

GitFourLoko

I like it. It keeps the beverage theme while having a more obvious pronunciation and the implication of a place to be social. Nice.

gitcafe is the name of a failed git hosting project in china. but it's been dead since 2016 (http://web.archive.org/web/20160121084706/https://gitcafe.co...) so it[s probably ok to reuse the name now.

That's the beginning of the end, this story is not unique unfortunately

My decision to use gitrc over gitea is looking better and better…

Would it be possible to make something like gitea that's federated on the issues level? I feel like that'd be really useful.

Gitea has been working on federation, slowly but surely.

To be more specific, I raised 50K€ funding in January 2022 for the benefit of two Gitea owners (zeripath and techknowlogick). They did nothing with this funding and blocked any possibility for anyone to use the funds, it just went away. It is a matter of public record here https://discourse.gitea.io/t/nlnet-grant-for-federation-conc...

The work that was done was from unpaid volunteer Gitea contributors.

Given this track record I would be very surprised if the same people are willing to work on federation. It does not make lots of money. It brings freedom to the users. Not profitable and no user-lock in: that's not what the VC will expect of them

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