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Gitea and Forgejo, Late 2024 Edition

Note: This is rant

The beginnings

24 October 2022, A Surprisingly announcement was made on Gitea Blog. that for the long-term success of the project, the for-profit Gitea Limited was created so that companies can contribute back to the project via sponsorship, donation, etc.1 but the lack of communication and transparency behind the establishment of the company. and also Gitea Limited also had taken over the domain/trademark previously owned by Lunny Xiao2, founder of Gitea. Some contributors objected and made an open letter about it, requesting the trademark/domain to be owned by a Non-Profit that’s owned by Gitea community, which remained unanswered(to this day) and so Forgejo has been created as a drop-in replacement soft-fork of Gitea on 15 Dec of the same year.

Right now

Fast-forward to October 2024, and Gitea now offers a Hosted service(operated by CommitGo, Inc.), self-host Gitea Enterprise(operated by CommitGo, Inc.), and a so-called “Community version”(satire).

While Forgejo maintains a “soft”-fork status until 15 Feb 2024.(forgejo/governance#58, Blog Post). When Forgejo announced that it’d be a hard fork and be completely independent of Gitea, While still thriving to make API compatible with Gitea3 and drop-in replacement is currently possible, the future might not.

The main difference between Gitea and Forgejo right now is not functionality but rather a project vision and management.

While Gitea still maintained a democratic election of “Technical Oversight Committee” members which 3 appointed and 3 elected, its domain and trademark are under the umbrella of Gitea Limited. Its enterprise and Cloud are maintained by CommitGo Inc. which was founded by members of the Technical Oversight Committee4 while "Gitea Enterprise is an offering of CommitGo, not the Technical Oversight Committee of Gitea or the Gitea project itself"5 Also, the community elected TOC will receive 500$ monthly compensation from opencollective.6

In the case of Forgejo, there’s no project leader or TOC but rather an agreement to be part of Responsibility which will decide by “the Forgejo community”7. While Forgejo is under the umbrella by Codeberg e.V.8 there isn’t any trademark registered by Forgejo9. There’s no compensation for contributors in Forgejo on a general basis, if there is, Forgejo is transparent about it. Link.

Comparison table

So, which one is better? To be fair to both sides I made a comparison table to compare Forgejo, Gitea and other self-host Git servers.

Gitea Forgejo SourceHut Gogs cgit
License MIT MIT until v8.0.3 / GPLv3+ v9.0 AGPLv3 and MIT MIT GPLv2
Version Open-Source, Enterprise(LTS, ESR10), Cloud Open-Source Open-Source Open-Source Open-Source
Official Image Docker, Kubernates Docker None Docker None
Controller Gitea Limited, CommitGo, Inc(Enterprise, Cloud)5 Non Profit Codeberg e.V.8 Drew DeVault Joe Chen(@unknwon) Jason A. Donenfeld
Official CI/CD Built-in GitHub alike11 forgejo/runner GitHub alike11 builds.sr.ht Custom12 None, Third Party only None
Database mysql, postgres, mssql, sqlite3 mysql, postgres, mssql, sqlite3 postgres mysql, postgres, mssql, sqlite3 None
Version Control Git Git Git, Mercurial Git Git
Contribution Pull Request Pull Request Email Pull Request None

Aside from this, there are also honorable to be mentioned like gitweb(by git), GitLab CE, etc. which are not mentioned in the table.

Summary

I decided to start this blog because of Matt Mullenweg’s WordPress vs WPEngine incident and the damage he caused to the community. But as evil as he is, it doesn’t make WPEngine look any better, but it also doesn’t mean WordPress is heading in a good direction for open source either.

I’ve also seen a trend of open source license changes to fight against big companies in recent years, especially in the SaaS market, which has affected many open source projects of companies that provide their software extended support for a fee. These restrictions prevent their projects from being used by big companies for free. While some turn themself into the open core. These undermine the ideology of open source and put the community in uncertainty.

Looking back at the current state of Forgejo and Gitea, Gitea finds a balance between Gitea Ltd. and community by a 3-seat democratically elected TOC. but I also hope the annual TOC election is as transparent as it used to be. And when compared to Forgejo, Gitea has a much larger group of users and contributors. But this doesn’t mean TOC won’t turn evil oneday.

While The Forgejo is fully community-driven. Forgejo has its own problems. Like other open-source projects, they don’t have the manpower. Forgejo is mostly driven by a few volunteers and while the project is largely community-driven, only a handful of people participate in the community. Please Participate（⊙ｏ⊙）.

Support Open-Source Project!

  1. https://blog.gitea.com/open-source-sustainment/

    "Some companies are unable to contribute back to open source via sponsorship or code contribution. Many more cannot contract individuals due to internal policies. In creating this new company, we are now able to offer support to those companies who do want to give back."
     ↩︎

  2. https://blog.gitea.com/a-message-from-lunny-on-gitea-ltd.-and-the-gitea-project#our-beginnings

    "... Throughout the life of the project, I have always personally owned both domains. As it continued to grow, I additionally trademarked the name “Gitea” in order to protect the project’s brand. ..."
     ↩︎

  3. https://forgejo.org/2024-02-forking-forward/#consequences-of-becoming-a-hard-fork

    "The Forgejo API will strive to remain compatible with the Gitea API going forward, after the hard fork ... Forgejo will try to remain compatible with Gitea. However, Forgejo contributors shall also use their own judgement whether to implement an API or not, and how. ..."
     ↩︎

  4. https://docs.gitea.com/enterprise/faq#what-is-the-relationship-between-commitgo-and-the-open-source-gitea-project

    "CommitGo is a company that was founded by members of the Technical Oversight Committee of the Gitea project. Commissioning custom functionality, or being a customer of CommitGo does not provide customers a say in the direction of the project itself or the inclusion of any code."
     ↩︎

  5. https://blog.gitea.com/gitea-enterprise#faq ↩︎ ↩︎

  6. https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#governance-compensation ↩︎

  7. https://codeberg.org/forgejo/governance/src/branch/main/AGREEMENTS.md#responsibility-distribution-table ↩︎

  8. Referred from https://forgejo.org/compare/#governance-and-transparency ↩︎ ↩︎

  9. https://forgejo.org/faq/#who-owns-the-forgejo-domains-and-trademarks ↩︎

  10. https://docs.gitea.com/enterprise/features/release-cadence ↩︎

  11. Both Gitea/Forgejo runner is based on their own fork of act ↩︎ ↩︎

  12. I took a reference from : https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/builds.sr.ht/tree/master/item/images/alpine/build.yml ↩︎

#blog #opinion