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Comment by fabrice_d | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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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 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.

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

Copyleft makes all the difference.

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.

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

> 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.

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.

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

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