The previous blog post is more explicit and reads Open Core:
> An enhanced enterprise version
But that's a general problem with these two blog posts. They leave much to interpretation. Except for one thing: Gitea Ltd is in control of the domains & the trademark and won't give them back. The days of a community led project are gone. Just like that.
It will be a pleasure to welcome you in the upcoming fork. Wouldn't you like to participate in a democratic Free Software project instead of working for free and help VC make tons of money?
Except the community never really owned them, it was only Lunny who did. He could have at any point used his ownership of these things against the community. The situation hasn't changed much in that regard except that I guess everyone trusts Lunny the person more than this ltd he's created.
To be more specific, I raised 50K€ funding in January 2022 for the benefit of two Gitea owners (zeripath and techknowlogick). They did nothing with this funding and blocked any possibility for anyone to use the funds, it just went away. It is a matter of public record here https://discourse.gitea.io/t/nlnet-grant-for-federation-conc...
The work that was done was from unpaid volunteer Gitea contributors.
Given this track record I would be very surprised if the same people are willing to work on federation. It does not make lots of money. It brings freedom to the users. Not profitable and no user-lock in: that's not what the VC will expect of them
I hope you & the rest of the community will consider writing a detailed postmortem. I take from some of your comments that there has been a series of issues which has culminated in this schism. As someone who has (currently stealth mode) open source projects they'd like to release with a similar model, with a commercial entity supporting a broader community project, I'd appreciate understanding what I should take from this in structuring my project. I don't think I'm alone in that.
Godot has a similar structure. The engine is MIT licensed, it's a member project of the Software Freedom Conservancy and one of the lead developers has a company that does Switch and PlayStation ports. The only difference between this and Gitea that I see is who owns the trademarks or whatever (SFC vs the gitea company), and everyone's fine with the way things run in Godot.
Compare Godot's governance page (https://godotengine.org/governance) with this blog post and the previous one. Godot's governance page indicates, clearly, that Godot is owned by the community and SFC is empowered to ensure that happens. There's no acknowledgement of the existence of W4Games (who are also not called Godot Engine Ltd), much less any governance role. This makes W4Game's position as "just one consulting company amongst many" which is much more palatable. If W4 wanted to take Godot to an open core or visible source model then, it would have to fork, despite containing the lead developers.
The worry here is that Gitea Limited will be in the same position as ElasticSearch in a few years and they've given no structural roadblocks against that while dropping community leadership for commercial leadership
Or maybe just cool down a little and give them the chance to clarify things? From reading the discord, this really doesn’t sound like a hostile takeover but well intentions with bad wording.
> A non-profit organisation owned by the Gitea community is created.
> The Gitea trademark and domains are transferred to the non-profit.
> The name of the company is changed to avoid any confusion with the non-profit.
A week ago the Gitea project was an informal community trusting elected individuals with essential assets such as the domains and the trademark. They had a clear moral bound (see https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#...) to pass on the ownership of the project to their successor.
But they thought it was ok to create a company and take the domains and trademark as if they were their property. Maybe the absence of a legal bound made them forget their promise, their moral obligation towards the Gitea community.
Creating a non-profit will avoid that kind of problem in the future and give back the domains and the trademark to the Gitea community. If the president of a non-profit was to transfer the domain name to a for-profit company they exclusively control, the members of the non profit will be in a position to sue the president for embezzlement.
If the for profit company refuses to give back the domains and trademark, that would be very damaging to the project. The post from Harald Welte on that topic in the Gitea forum is enlightening in that regard, see https://discourse.gitea.io/t/open-source-sustainment-and-the...
The other points you cite from the Open Letter are merely suggestions for future improvements (as stated in the letter), not demands.
This is a possibility if diplomacy fails. But diplomacy and dialog should happen first. Going public and publishing this open letter is a sign that other forms of diplomacy did not work (including private messages).
Although people secretly created the company month ago, the first public hint of its existence showed when someone inadvertently mentioned being bound by an NDA. Which raised questions that they could not answer... because they were bound by an NDA.
The Gitea Open Letter has links to the two documents that have the facts you ask for, at the bottom of the page. And with links within the text. They are:
It may be the case that Lunny forgot he has a moral obligation to the Gitea community that elected him year after year. Even though there is no legally binding contract.
What was done is morally unacceptable. But that can be easily fixed. Just give it all back!
Sometime people make mistakes, big ones. That happens and this open letter gives them the opportunity to make right by the community. A fork is a last resort option, when everything else failed. Patience and understanding is a good thing in Free Software communities. Even when facing what appears to be a malicious action.
A few of the top contributors are the one behind the company. It is fair to assume they are perfectly ok with stealing from the community as it directly benefits them...
Copyright doesn't exist in a vacuum someone owns the copyright on the logo, it's up to them to determine who they want to transfer / license that to. Trademark will be up to the USPTO and other jurisdictional bodies to determine who has the right to use it to minimize confusion to consumers.
The people doing all the work are "stealing" from the "community" that contributes much less? If someone wants to fork here, it seems like they would also need to step up the amount of contributions they're doing if the people currently doing the work are the ones organizing a way to make some money to pay for their time.
The example of Emby vs Jellyfin is illustrative here. Emby was "the open source Plex alternative", then they went commercial, then they went closed source. The community forked the last open release as Jellyfin, and despite most of the previous contributors being employed by Emby and the Jellyfin community being newer contributors, it's clear that Jellyfin has overtaken Emby these days, and has put more of a dent in Plex market share than Emby ever did.
Or I mean even Gitea has been on the other side of this, while the Gitea contributors _were_ gogs contributors pre-fork, they were not the largest.
1. The community governance structure that was promised by the Gitea developers
2. The reassurance that Gitea would be a stable platform to build on without having to compromise between the open source project and a commercial variant
I'm a user of gitea and sympathetic to this open letter but it doesn't mean much without significant contributors signing on, and being marked as such. I assume the Gogs developer isn't happy about this but I don't see his name either. Right now it's unclear the connection of the signees to the Gitea project.
Do I think it will persuade Gitea Ltd to give back the domains and the trademark? Honestly, I don't have high hopes. Even if each and every contributor to Gitea signed the letter, I'm unconvinced they will do right by the community.
This open letter had to be published even if it has little chance to be effective. It would be horribly wrong for something like that to happen in a Free Software project without offering a simple and gentle way to do right.
Ultimately it is quite possible the only solution will be a fork. And as the Gogs fork showed, it only takes a handful of motivated developers to succeed.
> An enhanced enterprise version
But that's a general problem with these two blog posts. They leave much to interpretation. Except for one thing: Gitea Ltd is in control of the domains & the trademark and won't give them back. The days of a community led project are gone. Just like that.
It will be a pleasure to welcome you in the upcoming fork. Wouldn't you like to participate in a democratic Free Software project instead of working for free and help VC make tons of money?