As part of the Forgejo project, a fork of the Gitea co-development platform was founded. The reason is the rejection of an attempt to commercialize the project and the concentration of management in the hands of a commercial company. According to the creators of the fork, the project should remain independent and belong to the community. Forgejo will continue to adhere to the previous principles of independent management.
On October 25, the founder of Gitea (Lunny) and one of the active participants (techknowlogick), without prior consultation with the community, announced the creation of a commercial company Gitea Limited, to which the rights to domains and trademarks were transferred (trademarks and domains originally belonged to the founder of the project). The company announced its intention to develop an extended commercial version of the Gitea platform, provide paid support services, provide training and create a cloud hosting of repositories.
At the same time, it was stated that the Gitea project itself remains open and owned by the community, and Gitea Limited will act as a kind of intermediary between the community and other companies interested in using and developing Gitea. The new company also intended to provide part-time pay for several of Gitea's maintainers (over time, it was planned to move them to full-time and employ additional developers). The plans also included the creation of a special fund through which third-party companies could sponsor the implementation of the desired innovations, making optimizations and correcting specific flaws.
Such a move was regarded by some of the participants from the community as a seizure of control over the project. Before the fork was created, an open letter was published, signed by 50 Gitea developers, with a proposal to create a non-profit organization owned by the community to oversee the project and transfer to it, rather than a commercial company, the trademarks and domains of Gitea. Gitea Limited ignored the community's suggestion and confirmed that it now has full control of the project. After that, it was decided that the community had no other choice but to create a fork and consider it as the main project to continue further work.
It is noteworthy that the Gitea project itself was founded in December 2016 as a fork of the Gogs project, created by a group of enthusiasts who were dissatisfied with the management organization in the project. The main motives for creating the fork were the desire to transfer control into the hands of the community and make it easier for independent developers to participate in the development. Instead of the Gogs model based on adding code only through one main maintainer who alone makes decisions, Gitea adopted a model of separation of powers with the right to add code to the repository to several active developers.
Source: opennet.ru