On Fri, 9 Aug 2024 at 19:38, Clark Boylan <cboylan@sapwetik.org> wrote:
I think Forgejo presents itself as a better incarnation of Gitea for OpenDev because it is more aligned in spirit and has higher transparency than Gitea. All the reasoning behind Forgejo and related relevant details are summarised in [1]
I think we should be careful making these assertions. In particular Gitea continues to be open source software developed in the open that accepts patches from external contributors. Last I checked they make their volunteer led "roadmap" (if it can be called that) public as part of every release they develop [2]. Yes, a private company holds the trademark, but as far as I can tell they continue to be doing open source. I don't think everyone has stopped using SQLite or Chromium etc just because a private company holds the trademark.
I don't read it as the problem being just (or mainly) the trademark. [3] See for example [4] and [5] (this is one issue, just spread over two places). I see it as an example of bad open source governance at Gitea. Also, at no point does the page claim that Gitea is not open source and it is indeed still open source, albeit with a curious approach to license interpretation and code acceptance. Another good selling point for communities of OpenDev grade is the more transparent security process. [3] Originally yes, it was a dispute about a sudden appearance of a commercial company behind Gitea which some considered to be a "community"-based project. [4] https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/pull/27455 [5] https://codeberg.org/forgejo/discussions/issues/67
Note the above is based on my personal interpretation of the rift that occurred but I am not deeply involved in either community. I do think that there are flaws in [1] like the assertion Gitea requires copyright assignment. (My own interpretation of that matter is that there was mass confusion over what the policy guidance required and what was requested and both sides could've handled the situation better. I am not a lawyer, but it seems that Gitea merely requests simplified copyright headers attributing "Gitea authors" and you join that membership retaining your copyright when code is merged. Again I'm not a lawyer don't consider this legal advice if you contribute to Gitea).
I think the problem is that it's not entirely clear (and all folks around, including you and me, can yell IANAL). Normally, one can mix and match MIT-licensed code, just preserving the copyright and license information as that is the clear requirement of the MIT license. Now, as cited above, they force the re-assignment of copyright. That's simply bad open source stewardship to me. Can they make such a rule without violating anybody's rights? Yes. Is it good? I think not. Oh, and on that note of licensing, the next and following releases of Forgejo will be GPL3-or-later-licensed.
Please let me know if this could be welcome on OpenDev. If so, I can offer my time for being a bridge between the communities and helping with the possible migration.
My personal opinion (I haven't discussed this with the wider team; we can probably use this thread for that) is that I'm not sure we would get many benefits from a change today which makes it a very low priority item for myself. In particular Forgejo's main strength appears to be the support for "forge federation" which we wouldn't be able to participate in as we use Gerrit as our Forge and Gitea/Forgejo would simply be git mirrors and content rendering.
I specifically haven't mentioned tech benefits because I don't think there would be any major ones *now* (except from the procedural ones already mentioned above). However...
If people want to migrate I think we should be explicit about what benefits we expect to receive from or provide to Forgejo as a result.
I think it opens a long-forgotten path to proper high availability. Seeing Forgejo as a more welcoming community, I think it's a better place to collaborate on that. Maybe it could result in OpenDev providing bug and project tracking capabilities based on Forgejo, reducing the need to rely on third parties (and good ol' Storyboard). But this is a long-term investment. Personally, I have this dream of combining Gerrit flow with Forgejo-based project and issue tracking. I have also a more concrete project now of considering the integration between Forgejo and Hound. And Forgejo benefits from supporting a use case in a major open source foundation.
Then balance that against the effort required to switch in order to determine if we should proceed. I suspect that if we were starting with a blank slate we would lean towards Forgejo, but we are not and so far Gitea has been functional.
I think it would be easy to outweigh the effort with any benefits since you said it's currently not relying much on any kind of persistence (correct me if I misinterpreted your words).