Hello everyone reading this.
This is a (hopefully unbiased) summary of what has happened today. It will be listed in chronological order.
So today(26 October 2022) at 03:33 UTC+2 it was announced that the following has happened:
- Gitea elected owners has tried to support Gitea maintainers (via bounties, direct donations, grants, and a few others).
- Also there have been corporations that are building on Gitea without contributing back.
- A new company was formed “Gitea Limited”, to ensure that support is offered to those companies who do want to give back. As certain companies, due to internal policy or other reasons aren’t able to give back.
- The Gitea project will remain open-source and a community project.
- Lunny, the longest elected owner of Gitea has transferred his domains and trademark to the “Gitea Limited” company.
- “Gitea Limited” has already been able to help move Blender to Gitea.
- “Gitea Limited” has already offered part time employments to a few Gitea maintainers.
- In order to preserve the community aspect of Gitea, they will experiment with a decentralized autonomous organization(a lot of people are currently associating this with cryptocurrency, which is not the case), where contributors will receive benefits based on their efforts.
- “Gitea Limited” offers support contract to companies.
Note: Lunny and Techknowlogick, two of the three elected Gitea owners are owners and involved with Gitea limited.
Due to the mention of decentralized autonomous organization(DOAs) a lot of people became wary of this, as this concept is associated with cryptocurrency, which most people have a negative attitude towards.
In the Forge Federation general chat room, we(the members of this chat room) were made aware of the hacker news thread regarding the blog post.
A bit later, I found the company that seems to be referenced in the blog post:
In which it’s clear that the company was registered on 24 March of 2022, so this has already been a long time in the making.
A comment made by Circlebuilder was made on the Gitea general chatroom to ask for clarification.
Hi there… I saw Gitea’s sustainment announcement of some rather big changes. In particular:
- For-profit incorporation of a Hong-Kong based company
- Gitea Enterprise version
- Work on creating a DAO
These can trigger a lot of speculations in FOSS circles if not followed up with more in-depth information. That can already be seen on the HN thread. I wonder what Gitea’s plans are wrt further informing the community?
Dachary shared something that he had in a conversation with lunny earlier this year:
Although the only advance warning I had was a private conversation (the only private conversation) I had with Lunny at the beginning of the year where he wrote something along the lines of “I’m llooking for VC money, a few millions”
Which I kept private until now. It looks like his efforts were successful. He also was not opposed to the idea of making proprietary software on top of Gitea.
Meanwhile an issue was opened on Codeberg’s community tracker, as well an issue was opened by Codeberg E.v. members regarding this. There was also the idea of Codeberg starting a new fork of Gitea. Codeberg has since opened a draft blog post regarding their stance.
It was made clear that the efforts of the Forge Federation wouldn’t be impacted by this change. Also for the grant for Gitea Federation shouldn’t be impacted, as none of the beneficiaries are involved with the for-profit “Gitea Limited”.
Now around 12:30 UTC+2 it becomes quite clear that everyone, including the Gitea maintainers are lacking context into what happened and what the implications are.
Lunny provides a comment to circlebuilder’s comment:
- I don’t know what did you mean. A company must be in some country. In future, we should also have branches in different countries. For Hong Kong, it’s one of the zero tax locations.
- A possible enterprise version could provide some special features only enterprise needed and a long term technique support.
- Gitea’s success comes from all contributors. We want to find a way to let contributors get benefits because of their contributions, DAO is a way what we want to try.
Lunny emphasizes that DAO is not what will be used, if there are other ways:
kdumont: I think specifically more information for what “DAO” might include is needed (because it is being confused with crypto) and broader communication that license will remain MIT.
lunny: The emphasis is we want to share the benefits with contributors, DAO is an option tool we found, it’s not a needed if there is better way.
I noted that this discussion should have happened before the blog post was ever made public.
In Gitea’s private chatroom for Gitea maintainers, there’s concern being raised by multiple Gitea maintainers about what this implies and they’re asking for clarifications. in this, it’s also concluded that a follow-up blog post will be made.
The idea of possibly having a plan if Gitea goes sideways was started by Dachary.
fr33domlover notes that there are two Gitea companies, and indeed there is a second one called “Gitea Hong Kong Limted”:
Started in 28 June 2022, which matches somewhat with the Blender forum post, which already hinted about Gitea as a entity. So far we have no idea why there is a second company and what the purpose of this company is.
A comment made by techknowlogick is getting traction on Mastodon, which puts people at ease regarding the cryptocurrency relationship.
Circlebuilder sees that a forgers guild could have an interest in such situations and suggests finally having a kick-off for such a project.
There’s a discussion regarding whether it’s clear(or established) that the Trademark + domain of Gitea are under the governance of the elected Gitea owners. Morally it should be, but the not-legal document doesn’t say anything about it.
In a search for the trademark that is being mentioned the whole time, I find that there are currently three trademarks, two pending and one active:
018597414.pdf (28.2 KB)
Where we can see that the trademark was in the making since 2021-11-10 and only got active as of 2022-03-09 with “Gitea Honk Kong Limited”(the earlier mentioned company, but not the mentioned company in the Gitea blog post) as applicant and trademark holder.
Which might suggest that Gitea company has been in the making since Nov 2021.
Dachary further iterates on asking the SFC to discuss plans on how to deal if Gitea goes sideways. Later on writes a mail to them
Gitea makes it clear that the trademark and domain has always been the personal assets of lunny and not under the governance of the elected Gitea owners.Which, as can be seen in the thread, doesn’t go well with people.
A nice quote by a friend of mine regarding this situation:
Well, [trademarking Gitea is] not wrong per se. The way it was done is secret is what’s wrong.
Regards,
Gusted
Gitea Maintainer