From a quick web-search: Apparently it was an open-source community project, but the governing organization created a for-profit entity and transferred most of the assets to that entity (brand, website, etc.). Gitea apparently still uses MIT licenses, but the community felt it was a betrayal of the open-source ethos. forgejo is a community fork of Gitea when the issues mentioned were not suitably resolved.

"Forgejo was initially created in December 2022 as a fork of Gitea. The fork occurred after a for-profit limited corporation ran by the lead maintainer of the project, Lunny Xiao, silently transferred Gitea's trademarks and operations to the company and began to establish an open-core model."[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgejo

Also see: https://gitea-open-letter.coding.social/

EDIT: HN discussion on the latter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33372471

Forgejo is more or less a drop in replacement for gitea

Github or other commercial alternatives aren’t for closed source either anymore.

Putting closed source code on github is basically asking them to launder it through LLMs