Developers of the collaborative development platform Forgejo have announced a change in licensing — starting with release 9.0, all new developments of the project will be distributed under the copyleft license GPLv3+, instead of the previously used permissive MIT license. Older 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 released under copyleft licenses in the project.
In particular, during the preparation of release 8.0, dependencies were discovered that were licensed under copyleft licenses not compatible with MIT, which forced developers to exclude these dependencies from the release. The incompatible licenses related to code associated with supporting the APA citation format (American Psychological Association) and a rendering engine for flowcharts based on the elkjs library. The application of the GPLv3 license will allow the reintroduction of the excluded dependencies, leverage more existing code, and focus on expanding the functionality of Forgejo.
Switching 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 users to a specific provider. Moreover, the change in licensing continues the development of last year's initiative, through which developers decided to allow the acceptance of changes under copyleft licenses and promised to change the license after accepting the first change under such a license (two days ago, the first such code was accepted into the Forgejo repository).
The change in licensing 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 will also not impact those who provide services and hosting koda temeljenog na Forgeju. Prijelaz na GPLv3 licencu zahtijevat će ispunjavanje dodatnih uvjeta od strane osoba koje distribuiraju binarne verzije Forgeja ili kontejnere temeljene na ovoj platformi. Prilikom distribucije takvih verzija bit će obavezno pružiti pristup punim izvorima na temelju kojih su izrađene verzije, uključujući sve vlastite izmjene.
Projekt Forgejo razvija platformu koja omogućava implementaciju na vlastitim poslužiteljima sustavima za suradnju s Git repozitorijima, sličan u rješavanju zadataka GitHubu, Bitbucketu i Gitlabu. Forgejo je fork projekta Gitea, koji je sam po sebi fork platforme Gogs. Fork Forgeja je napravljen 2022. godine nakon pokušaja komercijalizacije Gitea i prijelaza upravljanja u ruke komercijalne tvrtke. U Forgeju su nastavljeni principi neovisnog upravljanja i zadržana kontrola zajednice. Na Forgejo je prešao Git hosting Codeberg.org.
U prvom dijelu, Forgejo se pridržavao modela sinkroniziranog forka, pri čemu su sve izmjene vraćane u glavni projekt, ali je početkom ove godine donesena odluka da se platforma razvije kao samostalan projekt s vlastitom neovisnom kodnom bazom. Takva je odluka donesena zbog otežane sinkronizacije kodnih baza zbog nakupljenih izmjena koje nisu prihvaćene u sastav Gitea, kao i nakon promjene politike Gitea u vezi sa prihvaćanjem zakrpa (projekt Gitea počeo je zahtijevati prijenos vlasničkih prava na kod).
Izvor: opennet.ru
