This is from last month, but I haven’t seen any discussion of it. Seems like Forgejo is now a hard fork of Gitea, instead of being a soft fork like it was over the previous year.
The main reason I’m posting it now is this: “As such, if you were considering upgrading to Forgejo, we encourage you to do that sooner rather than later, because as the projects naturally diverge further, doing so will become ever harder. It will not happen overnight, it may not even happen soon, but eventually, Forgejo will stop being a drop-in replacement.”
https://codeberg.org/forgejo/discussions/issues/67
The biggest issue is they require your to give them your rights as they pertain to copyrights.
That means even if you submit MIT or GPL licensed code they can just instantly say “we relicense this code as proprietary” and there is nothing anyone can do.
They rejected a bunch of valid PRs. Including the one linked here because the author refused to assigned their copyrights to the Gitea corporation.
Thanks for the link. But is this really unseen in FOSS? My understanding is some FOSS projects do this so that it is easy to make major decisions without having to bring every person that has ever contributed to the project, kinda like how ZFS is stuck with license issues because they can’t bring all contributors together to approve a license change.
I’m not one to fight for software taken over by a corporate that is against FOSS. If you like Gitea, stick with it till you have a problem
My concern is that this hard fork means “till you have a problem” might be too late for a smooth switch.
I’m not going to be able to convince people to move. I’m sticking with Forjego until something goes wrong.
I’m not trying to start an argument, just looking for that balance between “gitea hasn’t done anything wrong yet” and “what if forgejo runs out of steam and the project stalls”
There are some advantages but generally it’s better for everyone to keep their copyright to prevent a company being able to take over and then deny users the software freedoms intended by the original license.
But everyone does keep their license. A company can not really take over in the sense that you lose your old code. They can stop developing in public but keep using your code, but so can you keep using the last public version and keep developing it. Or you can take your contribution and apply it elsewhere.
You’re right that the former license can’t be taken away from other instances.
Some projects chooses a license specifically to stop people taking code without sharing code back upon redistribution via copyleft (ShareAlike). Getting around that by changing the license defeats the purpose (projecting users software freedom).