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    Last time we discussed the Dec 15 announcement: https://lobste.rs/s/9sqfty/codeberg_launches_forgejo

    The Dec 26 update: https://forgejo.org/2022-12-26-monthly-update/

    My take. Forgejo seems to have been initiated by Loïc Dachary, who leads a small team of developers who are working on federating Gitea. So that is going to be one of the important focuses of Forgejo development. Loïc had just finished getting a grant to fund the development of federation, and the corporate takeover of Gitea may have been a concern with respect to the grant funding, but I don’t know for sure.

    Gitea is a huge project, with 1000 contributors, 50 maintainers and a very fast pace of development. The Forgejo fork was not the result of a popular revolt by the majority of active Gitea developers, as far as I can tell, since the blistering pace of commits to the Gitea repo does not seem to have slowed down. I can see that Gusted is listed as a Forgejo team member, but he is still actively committing to Gitea. So Forgejo has a smaller team, and it is being managed as a soft fork, where probably most of the commits will be copied from Gitea on github.

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      Blender specifically chose Gitea as it’s dev platform after Phabricator was shutdown: https://devtalk.blender.org/t/developer-blender-org-choice-for-gitea-reasons-and-timeline/24896

      I believe the argument for not choosing GitHub was that it was seen as a closed platform. Gitlab was not chosen because their were concerns of future changes in “paid” features vs “free” features.

      I wonder if the change in Gitea’s structure results in changes on Blender’s decision.

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        Apparently the Gitea open letter did not receive a satisfactory answer, so now there’s a community fork called (in the growing tradition of using esperanto names) “Forgejo”.

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          My understanding that they never received /any/ answer, so less than satisfactory indeed.

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            Here’s that open letter: https://gitea-open-letter.coding.social/

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            A bit tangential, but this kind of github inspired forge software appears to be very popular. While older alternatives get less attention. Looking at things like redmine, trac or even bugzilla, I do find their UIs more usable that this new breed of github clones.

            I am curious, what attracts people to this? Aestetics? Familiarity? Just better marketing?

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              You just used “Bugzilla” and “usable” in the same sentence. I think I need to go breathe into a paper bag for a few minutes until the flashbacks go away.

              The answer to your question might be that many people have different opinions than you about usability. FWIW I find GitHub to have generally the best UX of any source/issue/project tracker I’ve used, and I’ve used a lot over the years. (Although for local repo management the Fork app is my favorite.)

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              I’ll keep using Gitea till they ask me for my credit card info, and even at that I may evaluate paying for it if I find value in it and it’s affordable. I’m all for 100% free software, but sustainability needs revenue and developer’s need to eat.

              Gitea has been a fantastic piece of software for me and I hope it continues to flourish for years to come.