The developers of the Forgejo collaborative development platform have announced a license change - starting with release 9.0, all new developments of the project will begin to be distributed under the GPLv3+ copyleft license instead of the previously used MIT license. Old Forgejo branches, as well as corrective versions based on them, will remain under the MIT license. It is noted that changing the license will simplify the use of code distributed under copyleft licenses in the project.
In particular, during the preparation of release 8.0, it was discovered that there were dependencies distributed under copyleft licenses that were not MIT compatible, which forced the developers to exclude these dependencies from the release. Code related to support for the APA (American Psychological Association) citation format and a flowchart rendering engine based on the elkjs library were distributed under incompatible licenses. Using the GPLv3 license will allow you to bring back excluded dependencies, use more existing code, and focus on expanding Forgejo's functionality.
Moving to GPLv3 will also reduce the risk of unfair business practices, such as creating modified versions of Forgejo that are distributed with additional restrictions or create conditions that lock the user into a specific vendor. In addition, the change of license is a continuation of the development of last year’s initiative, according to which the developers decided to allow changes to be accepted under copyleft licenses and promised to change the license after the first change was transferred under a similar license (two days ago the first such code was accepted into the Forgejo repository).
The license change will not affect users installing Forgejo from distribution packages or building the platform from source code, even if they make their own changes to the code. The change also will not affect those providing services and hostings Forgejo-based code. However, switching to the GPLv3 license will require that those distributing binary builds of Forgejo or container images based on this platform comply with additional conditions. Distributing such builds will require mandatory access to the full source code from which the builds are based, including all modifications.
The Forgejo project is developing a platform that allows you to deploy it on your own серверах A collaborative Git repository management system similar in its intended use to GitHub, Bitbucket, and Gitlab. Forgejo is a fork of the Gitea project, which in turn is a fork of the Gogs platform. Forgejo was forked in 2022 following attempts to commercialize Gitea and the transition of governance to a commercial company. Forgejo continued to adhere to the principles of independent governance and maintained community control. Git hosting service Codeberg.org has transitioned to using Forgejo.
At first, Forgejo followed the synchronized fork model, in which all changes were returned to the main project, but earlier this year it was decided to develop the platform as a self-contained project with its own independent code base. This decision was made due to the complication of synchronizing code bases due to the accumulation of changes that were not accepted into Gitea, as well as after a change in Gitea’s policy regarding accepted patches (the Gitea project began to require the transfer of property rights to the code).
Source: opennet.ru
