> This report strictly audits the open source software provided to users under no condition of warranty per the BSD-3 license. As such, the researchers, and the users, are effectively developers of said software per its open source nature.
Nobody owns a domain name. You rent it, subject to the whims of the registry. Miss a single payment and you loose it forever.
Even if you always pay up on time, despite price rises etc, they can still decide to take it away: https://neil.fraser.name/news/2026/09/03/
PLC is imperfect, like every solution to identity so far, but it's a lot better (in terms of ownership / control of your own ID) than DNS.
The problem with ENS is only Brave and Opera support it. That's less that 5% of users. If Chrome had a way to add custom domain resolvers in extensions it would be a lot more useful because you wouldn't need to tell people they have to install a whole new browser.
I also don't have a problem if open source developers try to monetize their work. In fact I think it's great, if done right. But context is important here.
In Gitea's case, I think this could have been done right, with the community's knowledge and involvement. But that's not what happened. Two of the three "elected owners" of the project effectively undertook a hostile takeover, transferring the ownership of the domains and trademarks to a secretive private company, without telling anyone until after the fact.
I know people who were formerly active maintainers, and they were taken completely by surprise – even though it turns out that preparations for this had been ongoing behind closed doors for many months.
At first, I and many others thought it was perhaps a case of failures of communication, and were prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt. But after an open letter was signed by many community members, and the people behind Gitea Ltd had ample opportunity to improve the situation, they only dug their heels in and made things worse, and refused to answer questions beyond corporate-speak PR posts. It was at that point that the decision was taken to fork.
As a Gitea user and as someone who is excited about the forge ecosystem and the future of forge federation, I truly hope that Gitea as a community project continues to thrive, and that the company ultimately doesn't derail the community.
Unfortunately, I am also very pessimistic about that being the reality, and so I think this fork is a very positive development.
Some of them have migrated. I imagine others are taking more of a "wait-and-see" approach.
For what it's worth, Codeberg is quite a major contributor to Gitea as well as the biggest public instance, and they are supporting the fork and will be switching over after the first stable release.
> This report strictly audits the open source software provided to users under no condition of warranty per the BSD-3 license. As such, the researchers, and the users, are effectively developers of said software per its open source nature.