Gitea blocks PR from community, charging $$ for open-source contributions

The controversy here is described in the following comment:<p>&gt; Unfortunately, they have already merged a version of this code into the private gitea repo and are charging $$ for it. So Gitea Ltd. (owners group) has no incentive to review and merge this in an open source repo, even though the open source community has funded and developed it.<p>&gt; This is a cynical take, but I have raised these concerns in private channels and there has been no evidence to refute it. If Gitea Ltd. wants to focus its efforts on the private fork and to make money, that is fine with me, but unfortunately, they also decide what gets merged here, so there is a massive conflict of interest (cough open core). Since Lunny has blocked it and refuses to say why, it appears we are stuck.<p>&gt; I have asked them to commit publicly to not merging code in their private codebase that is still open for review upstream, but that hasn’t been well received, leaving me and some other members of the community pretty disheartened.

This is very shady. If there were plans to introduce a certain feature in their proprietary code base, then it should have been raised much earlier in the PR so people don&#x27;t spend time and energy developing this. Further, &quot;already merged a version of this code into the private gitea repo&quot; euh, hello licensing?<p>Gitea was already controversial in the sense - why leave a perfectly good closed source solution (GitHub) to another closed solution?<p>I think, for anyone seriously into self-hosting their source codes - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forgejo.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forgejo.org</a> is the way forward.

I&#x27;ve been very wary of Gitea since Gitea Cloud and CommitGo, Inc. became a thing. One commercial entity (Gitea Ltd.) is one thing (although the trademark fiasco around that was a bad look on its own [0]), but when a second for-profit quietly spun up around the same open source project with little explanation I got a bit sketched out and have been cautiously using Forgejo instead (it has its own problems I won&#x27;t get into here).<p>That said, I&#x27;d like to see more information before we jump on the outrage bandwagon. The only thing we have here is a PR that was blocked by a maintainer who&#x27;s not very communicative and the speculation of a random participant in the PR discussion that they&#x27;re intentionally blocking the merge because of a conflict of interest with the enterprise version. That&#x27;s not a lot to go on, and there are other possible explanations besides malfeasance.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33394280">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33394280</a>

Hi. I&#x27;m techknowlogick, one of the two reviewers who have requested changes on this PR. A couple of clarifications: 1. I hadn&#x27;t been able to continue my conversation with Kyle due to illness, and I am still dealing with it, but I am working on continuing that conversation. 2. The feedback that is holding up the PR is technical. Logging that amount of data has performance implications, and one of Gitea&#x27;s main tenants is that it can run on reduced hardware. We know what impact it would have, as we are dealing with it from other tables. We don&#x27;t have the ability to backport migrations to add indexes, etc.. (something that CommitGo has put a bounty on, though), so if it gets merged now and &quot;well fix the filtering&#x2F;etc.. later&quot; means that if it gets merged then we have at least 6 months of bug reports around performance issues. 3. the code that is in the alternate distribution is different and doesn&#x27;t include that PR. It is a few SQL inserts to log logins, package downloads, and git clones. 4. I am largely in favour of getting the PR merged, but if it means degraded performance and bug reports that we have to ask users to create DB indexes manually, that&#x27;s something that I would hope could be avoided.<p>CommitGo, is the largest contributor to Gitea, and has contributed Actions in its entirety to the project. If the goal is to keep code away from the project for profit, that would be the one.<p>The priority of the company is to ensure the continued success of Gitea.

A recent comment indicates that this outcome was more like a mistake and less line the skulduggery that the title indicates.<p>Public shaming might be a good tool for this kind of thing in general but maybe in this case it was premature.

I wonder what the legality of saying &quot;this PR is available under the MIT license upon being merged into <i>this</i> repo&quot; would be. A PR is copyrighted, and I guess it&#x27;s just implied that a PR is available under the same license as the main repository, but an explicit PR license could override this (maybe?, IANAL).<p>I suppose they could merge it, copy it under the MIT license, and then remove it, which overall seems kind of silly, but it would at least get your PR merged. Plus, this trick would look really bad from a PR perspective.

So the evidence here is that the Gitea Enterprise page now advertises an audit feature? Mainly for thoroughness: how sure are we that it&#x27;s the same code?

Why would someone be motivated to contribute free code to Gitea after everything? Is &quot;forgejo&quot; really so stupid a name that people are willing to risk being exploited by Gitea?

Seems like just some people wanting to merge stuff ASAP and others having other priorities&#x2F;IRL stuff and some commenters shilling our unfounded conspiracy theories.<p>Yes, the 3k+ LOC, 144 file PR is 1 year old and still not merged. Join the club.

The title is sensationalized. I read the whole thread. Gitea doesn&#x27;t seem to be &quot;blocking&quot; the PR. They aren&#x27;t preventing it from going in a release. However, they did pull the in-progress PR into their private repo early, presumably in order to make more money. Not great, but not bad faith.<p>&quot;Blocking&quot; would suggest to me that the PR is rejected but still ends up in the closed-source codebase, which isn&#x27;t the case at all.<p>@dang I flagged this because we&#x27;re at risk of brigading a community over a nothingburger.

In the link is a comment describing how Gitea LTD is stalling on a pull request and instead merged it into their private repo which they charge money for.<p>This is a PR that was funded with a bounty with the idea of contributing to open source.<p>Now is a great time to switch to Forgejo :-)

So? Why does a business have an obligation to give away their intellectual property for free? When you submit a PR to a business’s intellectual property, it’s still theirs.<p>The years go by and the beggar attitude of open source users gets more and more tiring.