Gitea contributor (“maintainer”) here [0] - we were blindsided by the original Gitea Ltd. announcement too, but if you look at any of answers in discord regarding clarification, it’s pretty clear that this is a better situation than the gitea assets being owned by a single person, and the intention is NOT to syphon money from the project or start a shillcoin or something like that.
The general consensus from us maintainers on the “Open Letter” is that it’s an overreaction. It’s not supported by a vast majority of the maintainers of the project and spearheaded by folks who have contributed very little. A VAST majority of folks contributing to gitea are still onboard.
We need answers. The communication was poorly handled.
The original announcement was completely bereft of details and now we finally have a draft of updated clarifications that should be posted soon (thankfully, this time we’re being consulted for feedback).
I think the original intention was “we’re seeing some revenue coming in and now we’re workshopping ways to get those funds back to contributors and maintain the project in a sustainable way”, but a lot of poorly-chosen words were used, and panic ensued.
TL;DR: give us some time to set it all straight and if it really looks like incentives are misaligned, please provide some constructive criticism.
ALSO, WE WOULD LOVE HELP & FEEDBACK FROM FOLKS WHO HAVE MAINTAINED SIMILAR PROJECTS SUCCESSFULLY
Lots of OSS projects are managed by some company, so I don’t necessary see this as a bad thing. It might even be better for the project in the long run. This “open letter” seems like an overreaction to me.
So what happens if the for-profit declines this request. Would the community be able to fork Gitea, come up with a new name, establish a governing body, and keep pushing forward on their own path?
Gitea started life as a fork of Gogs, so this seems entirely plausible, or even desirable, for two big reasons:
Large enterprise users have very different needs from indies and small communities, or even larger OSS projects. SSO, compliance, integration with e.g. “mature” devops tools like Jenkins and Artifactory, etc. all tend to drive enterprise usage. Smaller-scale users often care more about ease of installation and use, design and quality of the actual code, and openness to outside contributors.
DAO - Decentralized Autonomous Organization; basically a bunch of people who get together through the power of CRYPTO to achieve common goals. Right now synonymous with “scam”, but that’s mostly because the default way of making money in crypto is via ponzi schemes[1].
[1] and yes, I count “yield farming” as a ponzi scheme.
No it is not! “decentralized autonomous organization” is basically a synonym of “the FOSS community” it’s just that some people have subverted the literal meaning of words with particular implementations that are beyond terrifying. That does not mean it cannot be done better but apparently some people are unwilling to admit that the emperor wears no clothes and resort to surface level prejudice and childish dismissals.
If these (gitea) people have integrity and they want to find fair ways to organize this project then power to them! If not, then the reason for dismissing them is not because they used some words but rather because they did or tried to do something dishonest (which is not immediately apparent as soon as you claim you want to try to use cryptography to partially automate your organization).
I refer to my earlier comment on the initial announcement for context to interpret this one.
“decentralized autonomous organization” is basically a synonym of “the FOSS community”
I have never heard this definition, and I’ve been following FOSS since the late 90s and crypto since the white paper was published.
Note that crypto proponents love wrapping themselves in the open source mantle - almost all code is MIT-licensed, for example. But that’s just appropriating a cultural shibboleth. The ethos of crypto - artificial digital scarcity - is antithetical to what most people think of when they think of FLOSS.
Sorry but the ethos of crypto(graphy) is communicating without being misunderstood.
We figured out how to build artificial scarcity.. yay! (blegh). Now let’s build methods to manage the problem of “tragedy of the commons” - which is what we actually care about - this comes down to assessing what improves our collective security and by how much (relative to other such improvements). Such assessments are probabilistic and will be built on a social contract of sharing cryptographic commitments to assessments.
If we decide these assessments have meaning, for example by bridging into the legacy system by calling them “exchange rates” then what we’ll have are currencies that are scarce only in the sense that if you print too much you lose trust and your exchange rates suffer… a scale-free credit system; like the international stage is using to do p2p.
The system can be composed of sovereign individuals joining hands with all sorts of temporary contracts.. what happens if someone doesn’t honor their contract? Their exchange rate suffers. What happens if someone didn’t commit a legitimate improvement? Their exchange rate suffers…. This isn’t the only way to do it. I am just saying: we’ve been played for complete fools and it needs to end.
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.
this doesn’t make sense if you replace “decentralized autonomous organization” with “the FOSS community.” I’m sorry but it’s definitely cryptocurrency related. any other form of organization that does those things would be less decentralized than the current community of contributors. and I can’t imagine why they would add “autonomous” unless they were referring to DAOs as people currently understand them.
Why can I call FOSS community a DAO? I’m just saying this has precedence.
… they were referring to DAOs as people currently understand them.
Which I can agree is the concerning part.. which is why I mentioned earlier comment for context.
I am happy to be receiving engagement with this discussion and can admit that I am defending something slightly different than what they are doing but I feel that my defense gives adequate grounds as to /why/ they are doing this.
For me what is perplexing is what makes all these otherwise smart people feel like they have to limit the granularity of their discernment to “cryptobro” as soon as the notion of using cryptography to organize the causal part of societal communication is brought up. There is a lot of need for useful tools that can be trusted as well as a system of assessment that can give us confidence in funding those involved in building all this software. Incentives are hard to get right, but that is no reason not to try.. a large part of society is dedicated to that task (politics) and they are not using the best methods we know about.. why not?
I don’t see the connection between what you say is perplexing and what people have said in this thread. DAOs are a blockchain/cryptocurrency thing, which is not just “using cryptography.”
My premise is the literal intent in the phrase decentralized autonomous organization. Even though it currently refers to broken implementations it does not stop us from implementing something sane.
nobody will look through your post history to find a comment that you mention but don’t link to. and what was the point of arguing “decentralized autonomous organization” could refer to something totally different, if you agree that gitea is using it in the normal way?
I don’t see the connection between what you say is perplexing and what people have said in this thread.
In which sense do you ask that question? Are you referring to the viability of doing so due to project size and complexity?
Other than that, if the code is MIT licensed, there’s no issue in forking. I don’t know about a governing body, a person can take initiative individually if they so wish.
Interesting commentary elsewhere by kdumont:
Lots of OSS projects are managed by some company, so I don’t necessary see this as a bad thing. It might even be better for the project in the long run. This “open letter” seems like an overreaction to me.
So what happens if the for-profit declines this request. Would the community be able to fork Gitea, come up with a new name, establish a governing body, and keep pushing forward on their own path?
gitea is licensed under MIT, so it seems like yes they can just fork and rename the project.
Gitea itself is a fork of Gogs.
Gitea started life as a fork of Gogs, so this seems entirely plausible, or even desirable, for two big reasons:
Large enterprise users have very different needs from indies and small communities, or even larger OSS projects. SSO, compliance, integration with e.g. “mature” devops tools like Jenkins and Artifactory, etc. all tend to drive enterprise usage. Smaller-scale users often care more about ease of installation and use, design and quality of the actual code, and openness to outside contributors.
DAO. ‘Nuf said.
what are SSO and DAO?
SSO - Single Sign On
DAO - Decentralized Autonomous Organization; basically a bunch of people who get together through the power of CRYPTO to achieve common goals. Right now synonymous with “scam”, but that’s mostly because the default way of making money in crypto is via ponzi schemes[1].
[1] and yes, I count “yield farming” as a ponzi scheme.
Oh I see, Gitea is associated with a DAO.
no, they want to experiment with a DAO, but this is usually enough to get people to write off Gitea permanently
Yeah… pretty damning that the leadership is even considering it.
No it is not! “decentralized autonomous organization” is basically a synonym of “the FOSS community” it’s just that some people have subverted the literal meaning of words with particular implementations that are beyond terrifying. That does not mean it cannot be done better but apparently some people are unwilling to admit that the emperor wears no clothes and resort to surface level prejudice and childish dismissals.
If these (gitea) people have integrity and they want to find fair ways to organize this project then power to them! If not, then the reason for dismissing them is not because they used some words but rather because they did or tried to do something dishonest (which is not immediately apparent as soon as you claim you want to try to use cryptography to partially automate your organization).
I refer to my earlier comment on the initial announcement for context to interpret this one.
I have never heard this definition, and I’ve been following FOSS since the late 90s and crypto since the white paper was published.
Note that crypto proponents love wrapping themselves in the open source mantle - almost all code is MIT-licensed, for example. But that’s just appropriating a cultural shibboleth. The ethos of crypto - artificial digital scarcity - is antithetical to what most people think of when they think of FLOSS.
Sorry but the ethos of crypto(graphy) is communicating without being misunderstood.
We figured out how to build artificial scarcity.. yay! (blegh). Now let’s build methods to manage the problem of “tragedy of the commons” - which is what we actually care about - this comes down to assessing what improves our collective security and by how much (relative to other such improvements). Such assessments are probabilistic and will be built on a social contract of sharing cryptographic commitments to assessments.
If we decide these assessments have meaning, for example by bridging into the legacy system by calling them “exchange rates” then what we’ll have are currencies that are scarce only in the sense that if you print too much you lose trust and your exchange rates suffer… a scale-free credit system; like the international stage is using to do p2p.
The system can be composed of sovereign individuals joining hands with all sorts of temporary contracts.. what happens if someone doesn’t honor their contract? Their exchange rate suffers. What happens if someone didn’t commit a legitimate improvement? Their exchange rate suffers…. This isn’t the only way to do it. I am just saying: we’ve been played for complete fools and it needs to end.
no dude… here’s the blog post: https://blog.gitea.io/2022/10/open-source-sustainment-and-the-future-of-gitea/
this doesn’t make sense if you replace “decentralized autonomous organization” with “the FOSS community.” I’m sorry but it’s definitely cryptocurrency related. any other form of organization that does those things would be less decentralized than the current community of contributors. and I can’t imagine why they would add “autonomous” unless they were referring to DAOs as people currently understand them.
Why can I call FOSS community a DAO? I’m just saying this has precedence.
Which I can agree is the concerning part.. which is why I mentioned earlier comment for context.
I am happy to be receiving engagement with this discussion and can admit that I am defending something slightly different than what they are doing but I feel that my defense gives adequate grounds as to /why/ they are doing this.
For me what is perplexing is what makes all these otherwise smart people feel like they have to limit the granularity of their discernment to “cryptobro” as soon as the notion of using cryptography to organize the causal part of societal communication is brought up. There is a lot of need for useful tools that can be trusted as well as a system of assessment that can give us confidence in funding those involved in building all this software. Incentives are hard to get right, but that is no reason not to try.. a large part of society is dedicated to that task (politics) and they are not using the best methods we know about.. why not?
I don’t see the connection between what you say is perplexing and what people have said in this thread. DAOs are a blockchain/cryptocurrency thing, which is not just “using cryptography.”
My premise is the literal intent in the phrase decentralized autonomous organization. Even though it currently refers to broken implementations it does not stop us from implementing something sane.
nobody will look through your post history to find a comment that you mention but don’t link to. and what was the point of arguing “decentralized autonomous organization” could refer to something totally different, if you agree that gitea is using it in the normal way?
I don’t see the connection between what you say is perplexing and what people have said in this thread.
Nobody cares, thankfully, I owe him a lot as he has stood by me through thick and thin.
Problem ist, the term „DAO“ is now burnt. Just like „web3“ and „crypto“. No amount of explanations will be able to revert this.
Explanations maybe not, implementations definitely, the word “crypto” is only temporarily burnt.. you’ll see.
[Comment removed by author]
Scammable by outsiders too through the life-changing magic of exploits in smart contracts 💁🏻♀️
In which sense do you ask that question? Are you referring to the viability of doing so due to project size and complexity?
Other than that, if the code is MIT licensed, there’s no issue in forking. I don’t know about a governing body, a person can take initiative individually if they so wish.
Yes, I was thinking about the viability of doing so because of project size and complexity.