Codeberg launches Forgejo – Gitea fork
blog.codeberg.org
blog.codeberg.org
> we’re planning on establishing a fund to be able to provide support to contributors who not only contribute features, but also bug fixes, performance enhancements, and important refactors.
Sounds like any other for-profit company building commercial software. What stopped them from doing that while keeping the original OSS software copyrights intact?
Also curious to see their plan to pay out all the developers working on the OSS that underpins Gitea itself. The list is pretty long.
But the original copyrights and license stay intact, not?
By the way, hard forking always gives a sense of confusion to me. Will both projects have a bright future ahead, or will one of them fall by the wayside. Sometimes it takes a few years to crystallize, like with ffmpeg/libav.
I do understand Codeberg has ambitions and a place in the FOSS ecosystem (that is why I moved to it), I just hope it all pans out and they don't bite off a bite that is too big. No idea about Gitea, as I wasn't directly involved. They seem to go somewhat towards a RedHat model, offering support for money. It might be that if Forgejo will really take off and builds a community, Gitea will base off of Forgejo in some future scenario.
Countless examples either way. It can lead to a "nodejs/iojs" situation where the fork happened because of disagreement, and the upstream project realizes their mistake and eventually integrates the fork into mainline development repository. That probably would count as a success for everyone.
Or it goes the way of webkit/blink, where both forks are successful in their own way, although the project they forked from (khtml), probably is considered less successful.
Either way, that it's even possible to fork and continue working on both I'd consider a success in it's own way. It's the beauty of FOSS.
Maybe the best fork win, and also the base it was forked from.
I totally agree.
We can be upset that the Gitea people choose to profit personally on the brand, causing a hard fork, but the beauty born from the ashes is priceless: A new hard fork shakes things up, brings new initiative, people jumping in and saying they'd like to contribute.
There are other examples of forks where each direction is doing its own thing.
HackMD -> HackMD -> CodiMD -> HedgeDoc is another example. I believe they're all alive.
I believe Gogs, from which Gitea once forked, is still being developed on.
It is a healthy sign that this software is already so good that even if you hardfork and lose easy access to the advances made in the sibling branches, you probably don't need it, because the basics are there.
They will still benefit from upstream contributions.
It's not clear to me if they intend to further develop Gitea or work on the non open parts. Looking at the reactions and the announcement it looks like everyone assumes the latter.
I wonder why not both?
Currently (as I checked 30 seconds ago), downloading and installing is easy, but finding the small "Install" text on the bottom of the page is not. You need to further dig the docs to find the location of the source in the webpage, too.
Everybody assumes that Gitea took the first step towards this state, and they are right to assume that, because we have no other prominent examples.
And I tend to agree with them, too.
Which website did you open to download and install GitLab? about.gitlab.com > Resources > Install provides an overview of all distributions and installation methods (packages, cloud native, etc.) at [0]
> You need to further dig the docs to find the location of the source in the webpage, too.
I assume that the intention was to download GitLab's source code and start the installation from there?
The recommended way to install GitLab is through packages and cloud-native deployments. There are many components involved in the architecture [1], and these methods also help ensure that (database) migrations are run as intended, keeping upgrade maintenance short. Installing from sources is not recommended, albeit possible.
The source code is available for both, open source (CE) and source available (EE), following GitLab's stewardship promise [3].
Maybe this needs an update for the website, please let us know.
[0] https://about.gitlab.com/install/
[1] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/development/architecture.html
Running the GDK on Gitpod can be alternative: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-development-kit/-/blob/...
I went to "www.gitlab.com", which sent me to "about.gitlab.com". I scanned the page, and looked to solutions first, expecting to see "Self Hosted", not seeing it, I clicked to Pricing, where I failed to see Self-managed install. Possibly frustrated, scrolled down and found the "Install" link.
I remember peeking at Resources menu, too but I looked to the first three or so entries possibly. I chalk the situation to a bona fide PEBKAC + Friday tiredness.
> I assume that the intention was to download GitLab's source code and start the installation from there?
Actually no. I trust to a codebase which I'm using for a decade. In most cases, I try to find the code repository to look at the licenses, code organization, or to see how something works. In this case I wanted to do the same (see the licenses, and find the repo in general). I expected to find a direct link to the source code repository. This case was the same. I just want to see the code, and take a look around.
Being able to find the source code repository only via documentation, at least for me, sends the message of "The code is there, but we actually don't want you to see/access it so easily, unless you really want to".
> The source code is available for both, open source (CE) and source available (EE), following GitLab's stewardship promise.
I didn't know that EE was source available. I'm adding this as a plus to my mental notebook, and honestly thanks for being like this.
All in all, I understand (and deeply respect) GitLab for being what it is. I witnessed it becoming from a GitHub clone(ish) to a CI/CD first development platform. I possibly wanted to be greeted by a more developer-oriented webpage than a customer-oriented one, but I guess this works well for you, so I have no complaints.
Thanks for directly answering my comment, and filling the gaps in my knowledge. I really, greatly appreciate it.
On their 'Pricing' page, the different setups are listed - https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/
Click "Self-Managed" takes you to https://about.gitlab.com/install/
Fairly easy to find. If not, Ctrl-F.
The only parts that would not be, would be anything that comes from a contract and doesn't make sense to contribute back. For example, if a company wants some bespoke functionality that doesn't make sense in the main repo.
I have some vague notions for “community supported software”, where features and implementation priorities are driven by the community and not the enterprise. In order to give the developers a fair share, I was thinking of something similar to kickstarter rounds for feature sets, with a defined group of developers for that round.
I’m sure the practical reality is challenging. For example, that means doing fundraising and marketing regularly. There is also an opportunity cost — this is meant to serve the community, and it’s unlikely anyone will get FAANG level compensation for work on this.
The GPL is not scary. It just provides you the means to enforce what everyone knows is basic decency in Free software: you get total control of the software, in return you release your changes, and provide your downstreams with the same freedom.
That's simply too much friction. There's a reason most projects that see commercial adoption and are AGPL (or SSPL) started out more permissive.
Might just make this a long run goal - moving selfhosted gitlab over
The reason for the split was understandable, them going around proclaiming Gogs dead and unmaintained felt pretty scummy to me, however.
That makes the maintainer of Gogs sound rather petty, which I don't think is true. It is their project, they don't have to give control to anyone else if they don't want to, or implement features that they don't want.
A number of projects are explicitly “open source, not open contribution” and this is perfectly OK. If it is a problem for other individuals or “the community” than there is always the fork option (as taken by Gitea and now Forgejo) or if that isn't practical maybe offering to pay the maintainer, so can afford to make time to bother more with needs/wants away from their own (though in the latter case, don't be offended if this is politely rebuffed also).
I realize gogs is MIT license which is subject to easy fork. To avoid a fork when using such license, you have few options. One is fully feature your product, the other is expect your product to require domain specific skills that makes fork less trivial to move on; file format, data manipulation, etc.
So I wondered if original maintainer really wanted to avoid the fork, or simply don't care. It would be interesting to hear.
It would be nice to also disable the public listing of repositories for your profile page and to control it for organizations, too. (Not talking about private repos. Instead: these should be ordinary repos that remain accessible to anyone who has the link, but they are simply not aggregated into a single unified list that's available to anyone who clicks over to the "Repositories" tab. Think of them like unlisted YouTube videos, except they are all unlisted by default, rather than having to specifically designate each one as being unlisted—although that would work, too, it's just not the way it should be implemented.)
.. except from the owners of Github, and their paid clients ! you don't realize this?
Also, missed opportunity, Codeberg folks. Why Not "Erika"? ;)
Oh wow, that's a deep cut. I'm deeply impressed and amused. Almost to the point of yodeling ;)
(For those lucky enough not to be this old and/or German, there once were two sisters called "Gitti & Erika" who made some horrible, yet famous Schlager songs – folksy chansons. Including the title melody of the local dub of the "Heidi" anime, triggering basically every "80s/90s kid".)
(Not that I'm suggesting actually naming something after a boomer-level German in-joke in the first place.)
But diacritic marks aren't optional in Esperanto, they change pronunciation and meaning. "Forgejo", which is pronounced with a hard "g" (IPA /g/), is a nonsense word which means something like "distant gay".
The correct transcription without diacritics would be "forghejo".
Oh jeez, will every marketing copy repeat this phrase forever now?