Hacker News Reader

Comment by mpol | Hacker News Reader

> What stopped them from doing that while keeping the original OSS software copyrights intact?

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.

View on HN

> 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.

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.

> that it's even possible to fork and continue working on both I'd consider a success in it's own way

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.

As a quick clarification, Forgejo is a soft fork, not hard.

They will still benefit from upstream contributions.

There will come a point where the branches have diverged too far and merging becomes infeasible. So long-term, it's bound to become "hard".

Possibly, yeah. Although Codeberg was already sort of similar, they had patches on top of Gitea, so assuming it doesn't change too drastically it may stay feasible for quite a while.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com