> What is the scoop on the schism leading to forgejo? Like, the actual reason
My 2c as an outside observer - It is all about sponsored work.
Gitea long wanted a CI feature but from the outside, all anyone could see, was a Drone/Woodpecker integration. Codeberg started to spend a lot of time investing in this.
Then one day, Lunny(? i think) appeared suddenly with a fully compliant and working Github Actions CI implementation. The development had been done under a private sponsored contract.
It's great that Actions was managed to be open sourced. It's significantly better. But Codeberg really took it the wrong way and started agitating and sponsoring a fork. Nobody wants to be left in the dark.
There is a huge amount of interest in Gitea (and its forks). Everyone wants this to remain MIT, and it obviously will since there's no CLA. IMO all the "gitea company" stuff is about having a better legal structure for contract work on big features like that. That contracting is happening anyway so it may as well have a good legal structure.
Forgejo PR managed to twist that good announcement into seeming as a conflict of interest, because the "Gitea" name was reused for two different concepts. Now that it's CommitGo as the (legally independent) contract development agency, it's much clearer. There is a Gitea company as well but it just needs to hold trademarks and domain names and cloud stuff.
It's really a story of some great developers maturing into a more sophisticated legal and contractual level. The model is quite good, similar to e.g. Debian being the community project and Freexian being one of many commercial contractors for it.
Anyways, compared to Forgejo today, Gitea has the most development activity, all of the core developers, and Forgejo have given up tracking Gitea's main branch and are now adrift. Best of luck to them.
> Secondly, how do get in contact with contributors for sponsored work?
CommitGo is the legal vehicle for contracting the core developers. For other contributors, bounties are managed via https://algora.io/go-gitea/home