Everyone here is just ignoring the fact that this gitea is not the same gitea it used to be
The new one is called forgejo, and everyone should use that instead of gitea
What is wrong with gitea? Is not forgejo just a slightly modified fork that is regularly synchronized with gitea codebase? I know nothing about motivation of forgejo authors, where can I read about it?
I’ll try to summarize:
- Gitea is managed by a For-Profit that apparently popped out of nowhere -> profit motive conflicts directly with FOSS and since the corp isn’t well known it must be assumed acquisition was solely to make money
- Gitea now requires Copyright attribution, meaning if you push code to Gitea in an existing file it ain’t your code anymore -> omega level oof for a FOSS project because this essentially kills any upstream contributing (as seen by Forgejo deciding to stop their contributions)
- This Cloud Service being offered when Self-Hosting Gitea is really easy, again -> profit motive conflicts with FOSS but now on steroids because a “core” feature of their service will limit their ability to make more money
Thanks for explaining it, because it’s a long and complex story I didn’t want to type 😅
Also, probably the most touching point is how this happened. Gitea was a community project, and they were electing a leader every year or so, and giving them all the passwords (and it seems like the rights for the project, although it’s not stated anywhere) This “out-of-nowhere” company is just one the temporary presidents that hijacked all the domains, repos, etc. Registered a for-profit company and transfered everything there
The community itself wrote an open letter wanting explanations And at the end they forked gitea into forgejo
That’s a very selective truth way of telling the story. While what you wrote is technically correct, the “temporary president” in question is one of the founders and has been reelected for the position every time. He also did it together with some other core contributors, so while I agree that this was communicated incredibly poorly with the wider community, this wasn’t a hostile takeover at all.
I consider it a hostile takeover because the majority of the community was betrayed by their actions, and they switched from a democratic to a fascist governance model
It was absolutely a hostile takeover. And now the copyright thing. It’s obvious what they want to do with the former community project.
Fortunately the awesome Forgejo fork exists.
“secure alternative”? Others are not secure?
I guess it depends on your threat model, but if you’re dealing with mission critical proprietary code then it should really never be leaving your own companies infrastructure, imo. If for some reason it is necessary to use enterprise cloud hosting, established actors like Github, Gitlab or even Bitbucket still seem like the obvious choice.
The issue is this “Gitea Ltd.” company (or is it “CommitGo Inc.” now? honestly pretty confusing…) which appears to have been created with the singular purpose of monetizing Gitea, appeared out of thin air with no input from the community that actually develops Gitea. They’re basically saying “you can’t trust those other smelly hosts that have existed for years and have contracts with tons of huge companies, but you should definitely trust us with your stuff bro!”. Seems off to me.
Wasn’t the project bought out by some company, that now is behind this cloud service?
That’s why the fork Forgejo was made. Codeberg uses that fork as well.
No, some of the core Gitea developers decided to incorporate a Hongkong based for profit company to better monitize services offered to companies.
This by itself is not such a bad idea, but it was communicated incredibly poorly with the community left in the dark for at least half a year and the subsequent fallout was also dealt with poorly.
I think the best way forward for self-hosters is Forgejo because of that, but that doesn’t mean Gitea is currently a bad choice.
How does it distinguish itself from GitLab?
IME it’s way easier to self-host
From my personal experience running GitLab and Forgejo (Gitea Drop-In replacement/Fork):
- Gitea/Forgejo is easier to get running
- UI is less bloated/faster
- GitLab redesigned their UI and imo it’s shit now
- No features locked behind a “Pro” Version (Pull or Bidirectional mirrors are for example unavailable on GitLab self-hosted unless you shell out for premium)
- Gitea Actions is a lot more intuitive than GitLab CI, this is likely personal preference but it’s still an important factor
Definitely agree on the UI part. The UI of Gitea/Forgejo is very intuitive and easy to understand. When you go to a repository you just have the tabs to go to issues etc. and you can always see those at the top. The first time I used GitLab, I found it very unintuitive. There were 2 sidebars on the left side with their respective buttons right on top of each other. Issues and stuff are also in the sidebar, so I couldn’t find them immediately.
