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Comment by ekjhgkejhgk | Hacker News Reader

> The ideologically forked Forgejo made some license changes

Lets be clear. These "some license changes" that you reference was Forgejo forked Gitea and replaced MIT license with GPLv3. Forgejo doesn't want to be contributing to receiving effort from contributors into a project that then gets re-used, re-branded, and exploited by a big corp. By making the project copyleft they ensured that the contributions stay Free. This was an ethical move.

Gitea on the other hand doesn't mind sucking up free-of-charge contributions and handing them to a company to build their walled garden around.

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Correct, also see the initial discussion about changing the license: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/governance/pulls/24#issuecommen...

The issue with deviating from the upstream license is that only the code author can upstream a patch, since GPLv3 cannot be changed by a non-author of the code to MIT. Resulting in less being patched upstream, and so more merge conflicts, the maintenance burden I was talking about.

> Forgejo is more busy managing ideals, than creating software.

But managing ideals is far more important than creating software. Software is just a tool. It's a mean to an end, it's not the end in itself.

If software improves humanity we should create it. If not, we shouldn't. We shouldn't create software just because. We can, but that's not ethical.

And regarding your comments that "the original contributors stayed with Gitea", as if that's a point in favor of Gitea: Well of course! If the original contributors wanted copyleft that's how they would've licensed it. To me that just reinforces that I don't want to contribute to their project.

Not sure why you misquoted, I said "the main contributors stayed with Gitea", also see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45929247#45931139

When deciding which software fork to pick, it is about the development power. Also note my point about security: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45929247#45930310

The misquotation was an accident but the point is the same. If the set of people who wanted to contribute to Free software split with from those who wanted to work for companies for free, that's an improvement.

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