To preserve the community aspect of Gitea we are experimenting with creating a decentralized autonomous organization where contributors would receive benefits based on their participation such as from code, documentation, translations, and perhaps even assisting individual community members with support questions.
I heard a rumor that they’re not actually intending to launch their own coinscam and that the way it was announced it came across differently from the actual intention but I don’t have a reliable source to back that up yet. It’s reasonable to be concerned about this but I wouldn’t write them off yet.
We don’t plan on selling crypto or creating some shitcoin
the DAO was mentioned as a possible way to ensure public and transparent community governance, but I believe it is possible to do that without cryptocurrency (still investigating if that is indeed possible, but…
wanted to be upfront with areas we were exploring.)
(Although I’ve since noticed that have at least one sponsor who is blockchain-related which is also bad.)
How so ? They haven’t actually done anything you can blame them for, they’re just trying to find ideas for something that hasn’t been completely solved. How about you help them finding better ones ?!
They haven’t actually done anything you can blame them for
“gitea is going to have to go in the bin for me” … if they implement a blockchain-based DAO. Apologies, I thought that was implicit but I could have made it explicit.
Look, this is inevitable. However it is worrying in the sense that it matters how it is implemented, ethereum is not a real solution … these matters are too serious to just roll with whatever is around.
As an aside; I wonder what happened to mathematics… people are content with a theorem prover thing sitting on top of a massive amount of proprietary foundations?!
Mathematics is only convincing if you can trace the argument down to the axioms. Obviously the proofs stand on their own so technically you don’t need to run the theorem prover to be sure that it is correct, however, people build these theorem provers so that they can trust the verdict it provides.. and we will be heading into the future on this foundation?! It’s laughable and from my point of view it is because the free software world has not established a proper negotiation position; which is exactly what risk assessments and credit systems will give us.
Agreed. I do think this is preferable to an SSPL-like solution. Ultimately, I suppose there is no effective way to take back from the greedy without being greedy yourself.
Funny enough, I had to stop myself from tagging the story under merkle-trees, since I anticipated that the short paragraph you quoted would become a big part of the discussion.
I mean, Git is literally a Merkle tree, so the tag should be appropriate? I do understand why we can’t call programming hacking and cryptography crypto any more, but still…
Wasn’t meant as a justification so much as an observation. I personally think the best response to greed is… nothing. Call it out and move on. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
Why is that worrying? That if you write a lot of code you’ll get more privileges? Is there a concern about state actors breaking gitea through the front door?
It’s worrying because “decentralized autonomous organization” usually means some crypto-currency-related thing. That means the project will get flooded by cryptobros who want to use the project as leverage to (a) legitimise crypto-currency, (b) financially exploit each other, or (c) both, rather than contributing to the project itself.
Understood. I personally believe that matters regarding open source sustainability do have a home here on Lobsters, but I also know that not everyone feels the same. Thank you for explaining your reasoning.
I hope they would do a split between foundation and company like matrix does with matrix.org and element.io. (Maybe not like mozilla with org owning corp). But we’ll have to see what stays open and freely licensed in the open core model. Maybe it will fork (again, as gitea from gogs).
This really goes to show that Open Source sustainability is a HARD problem to solve.
With this direction, it would make Gitea a slightly worse product than Gitlab: community edition open source with a commercial entity behind offering an enterprise version.
I’ve been running a personal Gitea instance to self-host my own code for years with very little fuss, and I’m also ideologically friendly to cryptocurrency and -adjacent projects on a personal level. So I have no particular problem with Gitea developers looking into the possibility of organizing some development on Gitea as a DAO.
I’m interested in seeing how useful, if at all, they find organizing as a DAO to work for their stated goal of making the free software project more financially sustainable, and it sounds like this is a very early and speculative thing anyway. In any case the Gitea codebase is still an MIT-licensed free software project with all the implications that entails about the freedom of any user to fork it if they want to change anything about the codebase.
My biggest concern with Gitea is still that I can’t actually use it as a replacement for Github-hosted free software projects I work on, which is the standard collective-action problem of any proprietary platform software with a free software alternative. This is completely orthogonal to any decisons internal to the project about governance, and strikes me as both a harder and more important problem to try to solve.
The worrying part…
is the worrying part for me as well. Does that mean those enhancements are proprietary?
I heard a rumor that they’re not actually intending to launch their own coinscam and that the way it was announced it came across differently from the actual intention but I don’t have a reliable source to back that up yet. It’s reasonable to be concerned about this but I wouldn’t write them off yet.
This was the reply I got: https://twitter.com/giteaio/status/1585297381926793216
(Although I’ve since noticed that have at least one sponsor who is blockchain-related which is also bad.)
Allegedly, that sponsor made a one-time donation a good couple of years ago, and has not done so since, so it’s listed for historical reasons only.
Yeah, that probably means gitea is going to have to go in the bin for me. Which is a shame because I was quite liking it as a self-hosted solution.
How so ? They haven’t actually done anything you can blame them for, they’re just trying to find ideas for something that hasn’t been completely solved. How about you help them finding better ones ?!
“gitea is going to have to go in the bin for me” … if they implement a blockchain-based DAO. Apologies, I thought that was implicit but I could have made it explicit.
Look, this is inevitable. However it is worrying in the sense that it matters how it is implemented, ethereum is not a real solution … these matters are too serious to just roll with whatever is around.
As an aside; I wonder what happened to mathematics… people are content with a theorem prover thing sitting on top of a massive amount of proprietary foundations?!
Mathematics is only convincing if you can trace the argument down to the axioms. Obviously the proofs stand on their own so technically you don’t need to run the theorem prover to be sure that it is correct, however, people build these theorem provers so that they can trust the verdict it provides.. and we will be heading into the future on this foundation?! It’s laughable and from my point of view it is because the free software world has not established a proper negotiation position; which is exactly what risk assessments and credit systems will give us.
Agreed. I do think this is preferable to an SSPL-like solution. Ultimately, I suppose there is no effective way to take back from the greedy without being greedy yourself.
Funny enough, I had to stop myself from tagging the story under merkle-trees, since I anticipated that the short paragraph you quoted would become a big part of the discussion.
I mean, Git is literally a Merkle tree, so the tag should be appropriate? I do understand why we can’t call programming hacking and cryptography crypto any more, but still…
The linked article isn’t about Git, it’s about an organization that’s providing VCS as a service, and how it’s planning to fund itself in the future.
That sounds like an easy justification for a lot of things.
Wasn’t meant as a justification so much as an observation. I personally think the best response to greed is… nothing. Call it out and move on. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
Why is that worrying? That if you write a lot of code you’ll get more privileges? Is there a concern about state actors breaking gitea through the front door?
It’s worrying because “decentralized autonomous organization” usually means some crypto-currency-related thing. That means the project will get flooded by cryptobros who want to use the project as leverage to (a) legitimise crypto-currency, (b) financially exploit each other, or (c) both, rather than contributing to the project itself.
Ah, thanks for explaining! I didn’t catch the connection between the terms used and cryptocurrency stuff.
For anyone worried about Gitea shilling some web3 BS: https://social.gitea.io/@gitea/109235272214010635
I’m still concerned a bit, but wouldn’t bury them just yet.
[Comment removed by author]
There is a detailed (and ongoing) Codeberg response as well.
Flagged as off-topic. There’s nothing technical to discuss here and the void will be filled with pot-shots at vague statements.
Understood. I personally believe that matters regarding open source sustainability do have a home here on Lobsters, but I also know that not everyone feels the same. Thank you for explaining your reasoning.
I hope they would do a split between foundation and company like matrix does with matrix.org and element.io. (Maybe not like mozilla with org owning corp). But we’ll have to see what stays open and freely licensed in the open core model. Maybe it will fork (again, as gitea from gogs).
This really goes to show that Open Source sustainability is a HARD problem to solve.
With this direction, it would make Gitea a slightly worse product than Gitlab: community edition open source with a commercial entity behind offering an enterprise version.
I’ve been running a personal Gitea instance to self-host my own code for years with very little fuss, and I’m also ideologically friendly to cryptocurrency and -adjacent projects on a personal level. So I have no particular problem with Gitea developers looking into the possibility of organizing some development on Gitea as a DAO.
I’m interested in seeing how useful, if at all, they find organizing as a DAO to work for their stated goal of making the free software project more financially sustainable, and it sounds like this is a very early and speculative thing anyway. In any case the Gitea codebase is still an MIT-licensed free software project with all the implications that entails about the freedom of any user to fork it if they want to change anything about the codebase.
My biggest concern with Gitea is still that I can’t actually use it as a replacement for Github-hosted free software projects I work on, which is the standard collective-action problem of any proprietary platform software with a free software alternative. This is completely orthogonal to any decisons internal to the project about governance, and strikes me as both a harder and more important problem to try to solve.