The developers of the collaborative development platform Forgejo have announced a change in licensing — starting with version 9.0, all new developments of the project will be distributed under the copyleft license GPLv3+ instead of the previously used permissive MIT license. Old branches of Forgejo, as well as corrective versions based on them, will remain under the MIT license. It is noted that the change in licensing will simplify the involvement of code distributed under copyleft licenses in the project.
In particular, during the preparation of version 8.0, dependencies distributed under copyleft licenses incompatible with MIT were identified, which forced the developers to exclude these dependencies from the release. The incompatible licenses were related to the support of the APA (American Psychological Association) citation format and a diagram-rendering engine based on the elkjs library. The adoption of the GPLv3 license will allow the return of the excluded dependencies, utilize more existing code, and focus on expanding Forgejo's functionality.
The transition to GPLv3 will also reduce the risk of unfair business practices, such as creating modified versions of Forgejo distributed with additional restrictions or creating conditions that tie the user to a specific provider. Moreover, the change in licensing is a continuation of last year's initiative, in which the developers decided to allow accepting contributions under copyleft licenses and promised to change the license after the first contribution under such a license was submitted (two days ago the first such code was accepted into the Forgejo repository).
The license change will not affect users installing Forgejo from distribution package repositories or those building the platform from source code, even if they make their own modifications to the code. The change will also not impact those providing services and hosting services code based on Forgejo. Transitioning to the GPLv3 license will require additional conditions to be met by those distributing binary builds of Forgejo or container images based on this platform. Distribution of such builds will necessitate providing access to the full source texts upon which the builds are based, including all proprietary modifications.
The Forgejo project is developing a platform that allows for deployment on your own servers system for collaborative work with Git repositories, similar to what GitHub, Bitbucket, and Gitlab solve. Forgejo is a fork of the Gitea project, which in turn is a fork of the Gogs platform. The Forgejo fork was created in 2022 after attempts to commercialize Gitea and the transfer of control to a commercial company. Forgejo has continued to apply principles of independent governance and maintained accountability to the community. Git hosting Codeberg.org has transitioned to using Forgejo.
Initially, Forgejo adhered to a synchronized fork model, where all changes were returned to the main project, but at the beginning of this year it was decided to develop the platform as a stand-alone project with its own independent codebase. This decision was made due to the increasing complexity of synchronizing codebases due to the accumulation of changes not accepted into Gitea, as well as after Gitea's change in its patch acceptance policy (the Gitea project began requiring the transfer of ownership rights to the code).
Source: opennet.ru
