This is a pretty immature community IMO. The gogs maintainer just has life sometimes and they want to fork because he leaves some PRs open for a while. Learn some patience, the project will be better off for it.
> This is not the reason of the fork. The reason is that he refuses to give more people write access to the project to keep it going
Others don't need write access "to keep the project going" unless they intend to ship releases without him/her- they can make PRs and the maintainer will merge them when they are back. Perhaps the Gitea committers want a more predictable release cadence?
I agree that a fork is probably the best solution here, due to the impedance mismatch, the forkers don't seem to be fans of the BDFL model. Additionally, "community" is a much wider term than how you used it, it's not just other contributors but also includes users and bug reporters. I wish Gitea the best of luck, but I'll remain a Gogs user.
They don't, but I'm free to express my distate for them if they do. That goes for much in life.
Forking is not a decision to be taken lightly. Even the most just fork will fracture the community and weaken the software's development. Contributors are now being asked to take sides and both sides are getting fewer contributions. The stress this puts on the original maintainers is also non-trivial.
Look at ffmpeg/libav. It forked for similar reasons on the surface, but in reality it was to forcibly take control of the vernerable project over petty disagreements. For years the users and developers suffered alike as libav was shipped by default in Debian due to politics and received subpar workmanship and more security vulnerabilities that were fixed on slower schedules, all while taking contributors and users away from ffmpeg. After nearly a decade libav is finally dead in the water and ffmpeg is becoming the default on Debian again, but not after lots and lots of damage to the project.
On the other hand, you have examples like nodejs/iojs, where there were much more tangible reasons and alternative solutions were explored longer and more earnestly, and they regretfully were forced to fork for the good of the ecosystem. And they were right, eventually the two projects merged together under better oversight.
But the gitea folks do not have nearly as much clout behind their efforts IMO, and as a result their move to fork is extremely harmful to gogs development.
Considering how fast GitLab is moving, if Gogs/Gitea wants to remain relevant, they really have to move at a much faster pace than they use to. Judging by Unknwon's comment in this issue
it seems like Gogs is driven by a passion and it doesn't matter at the end if he is the only user. As he puts it
> Gogs isn't a business, making it is what I love to do
I'm not sure if his stance has changed, since this issue was from July. I'm also not sure, if he fully realizes he is sitting on a potential golden goose. The market for Git hosting in Enterprise is still very much up for grabs.
They compete in the mindshare sense. If a company is determined to treat Git hosting as commodity product, they are going to look at gitlab, gogs/gitea, gitbucket, and a bunch of other solutions.
As you point out, you either go with fast vs feature rich.
GitLab is working towards making things faster and easier to install. Is Gogs/Gitea working towards making it more feature rich?
If Gogs market are hobbyist who want to run it on a Raspberry PI, then I don't see GitLab being a threat. If Gogs wants to be solution that larger companies would consider using, then they are going to have to compete with GitLab's, which means introducing more features.
This Gitea fork appears to be a desire to move faster with more features. I've posted this in another response, but this a diff from the point of divergent to the latest commit for each master branch.
Hey, thanks for the feedback. We're aware of issues people experience with latency on GitLab.com and we're working to make it better. You can see some of the history regarding this issue here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/59
Why do you think gitea doesn't care about code quality? To improve the code quality we even include linting and things like vet into the ci process. Beside multiple refactorings to improve the quality. Gogs got more than 1k lint errors, gitea got none ;)
Your mindset is totally whack. Gogs does not have to compete with GitLab, it can fill its own niche. Who are you to tell him how to use his "golden goose"? Why does it need to be a business? Jesus christ.
I am not saying it is a golden goose. I am saying it has potential to be. If he wants to work at his own pace, then all the power to him but this path most likey wont lead to anything but a hobby project.
He can't expect others to not want to push for greater git mindshare. Gogs is licensed under mit and he has absolutely no say in how others want to evovle it. This is how permissive licenses work.
There's nothing wrong with being a hobby project - some of the best software is exactly that.
To expand on the goose metaphor, attempts to extract additional value from a goose that lays golden eggs oftentimes kills the goose: I'm sure a few years ago some VCs looked at CyanogenMod and saw loads of potential, but here we are.
It's perfectly fine for Gitea to evolve or even monetize via Gitea Inc, but it will continue to compete with Gogs if the maintainer wills.
So gogs can be that and gitea can be something else, why are you still thinking that they don't have a good reason for their fork if they have different ideas about which niche they want to serve.
"the project that you took the first 95% of your work from"
The project that explicitly donated its code to the public to use and re-purpose as it saw fit you mean?
I got confused by the use of the word "took". And that you seem upset that other contributors get to choose how they want to contribute, even if the originator disagrees. So they are volunteering wrong? Or Hobbying wrong? Glad you can set them straight.
There are plenty of systems of generating code where the creator retains these rights and things are organized in a top down hierarchical manner. These are what FOSS license are explicitly fighting against.
You misunderstand my point. Yes, they have a right to and yes, that is a good and explicitly desirable thing, but there is a courtesy and tact to such things that this project lacks. They are disrespectful of their roots.
As a complete bystander there may be history I'm completely ignorant of, but in Gogs issue 1304 Unknwon themselves wrote:
"In my point of view, it's a sign of success of Gogs that Gitea forked it. Gogs is under MIT license and there is no problem with me totally that Gitea is developing its own version. It happens often in open source community(when you are not satisfied with upstream version, I fork a lot actually)."
In the same issue comment Unknwon also states that they believe Gogs and Gitea to have fundamental philosophical differences, and finishes off with thanking everyone and wishing happy coding.
I don't know all the facts and Unknwon's personal view may have changed in last 18 months, but just judging by the philosophy of the original author and maintainer of Gogs the lack of courtesy, tact and respect of their roots that you refer to might be an opinion of yours that Unknwon doesn't share. If that is so, then what do you mean they lack courtesy, tact and respect towards?
Of course, if I'm mistaken or there are more recent opinions of Unknwon's that contradict this, then please disregard this comment.
Maybe I do, but I don't think so. It sounds like we just disagree on what respect/courtesy/tact is due to the original contributor to a project. I don't see the implicit hierarchy that you do. Roots are important to history and worth some kudos, but don't and shouldn't carry any power at all.
One faction of developers parted ways with another faction because they disagree on direction, in this case the minority faction has the rights to the name. We get a choice, they all get to donate their work to the public as they wish to.
This is unintuitive to our ape brains, but it is objectively better to remove ego and status concerns from collaborative projects.
yes, but it can, and if people want it to, it should. besides, why wouldn't you want it to be a business? businesses make money, which can pay for development of new features and better support for users. sounds like a win to me.
Sure. 100%. It's up to him for how he wants to run an OSS project.
In the same way, if people in the community have different ideas they're more than welcome to fork. If you don't want that to happen, either listen more to the community or don't open source a project.
> This is a pretty immature community IMO. The gogs maintainer just has life sometimes and they want to fork because he leaves some PRs open for a while. Learn some patience, the project will be better off for it.
what a stupid excuse, reminds me of people excusing the creator of Coffee Script because "Jeremy he was busy". if your work depends on an open-source project and the author "has life" so that critical bugs aren't resolved or important PR aren't merged then the only mature thing is to fork and let the maintainer get "life" as much as he wants. Because he is not irreplaceable
