Hello everyone, if you're reading about the #gitea changes. It could benefit to understand the full picture, I've written a summary of what happened today and as well what @dachary, @humanetech and I found out today.
https://forum.forgefriends.org/t/gitea-ltd-company/917/8
https://forum.forgefriends.org/t/gitea-ltd-company/917/8
Gitea Ltd company
Hello everyone reading this. This is a (hopefully unbiased) summary of what has happened today. It will be listed in chronological order.forgefriends
Aral Balkan
in reply to Gusted • • •It shows that either Lunny doesn’t understand what VC is or that there’s a desire to make a lot of money with Gitea in a way that isn’t compatible with being a community project.
“Enterprise version” plans are not great either. Just look at GitLab.
CodeBerg might want to consider sustaining their own fork while the codebase is still simple.
Aral Balkan reshared this.
Many Colors, Maybe Moved
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Strypey
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •> “Enterprise version” plans are not great either.
I agree that they often haven't been. Perhaps because they've been approached as a way to generate monopoly profits, so source code for them is kept secret (either not published and therefore subject to trade secret protection not copyright), or published under a non-free license. But in practice, large orgs have different hosting needs from small ones, and having separate versions can address that.
@Gusted @dachary @humanetech
Jens Finkhäuser 🌻
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •FediTips has moved!
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •@jwildeboer
Yes, it's very disturbing if they are accurately quoted.
VC money never seems to go well for community projects 😢
Either a project is openly all about money, in which case it shouldn't be taking unpaid contributions because that's exploitation.
Or a project *is* about volunteering and community spirit, in which case it shouldn't be taking VC money because that will destroy the community.
bhaugen
in reply to FediTips has moved! • • •Effects of VC money on one project I worked on:
The VC explained that their investors expected a return on their investment that was larger than what they could get from safer investments,. They got the project to spend money on facilities and sales and marketing people. Then they decided they would not get enuf profits so they cut them off, but because of the VC-led ongoing expenses, the project was unsustainable and folded.
Esther Payne 🏴
in reply to bhaugen • • •The other thing to consider is that a project founder may be a good leader of a small project, but wholly unsuitable as a leader to make it into a venture. Or to manage the burn rate of a rapidly growing one.
Esther Payne 🏴
in reply to Esther Payne 🏴 • • •Look at the choices of licences etc. VCs often prefer specific licences. Which should give us a clue really.
Chip Butty
in reply to Esther Payne 🏴 • • •Esther Payne 🏴
in reply to Chip Butty • • •Aral Balkan
in reply to Esther Payne 🏴 • • •Requires far more transparency. All this should be public.
For my part, I’ve posted all correspondence publicly. That, at least, should be the norm:
https://ar.al/2022/07/29/nlnet-grant-application-for-domain/
#PublicMoneyPublicCodePublicProcess
@otfrom @bhaugen @feditips @Gusted @dachary @humanetech @jwildeboer
NLnet Grant Application for Domain
Aral BalkanEsther Payne 🏴
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •I think it also helps with sustainability because when you can see what a project gets in funding, what it produces with that funding helps with the long term credibility of that project.
Stefan Sperling
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •I am lucky enough to have other paid projects that do not eat up all of my time, and kept going regardless at a slow pace (it's been 5 years, and I never thought my side-project would last that long).
I do see one advantage: No money -> no pressure -> no burnout. The small community we have is still 100% volunteer-driven which evens out the project's playing field. This works very well, as long as people are having fun.
No doubt, it is far too difficult to find funding for open source / free software projects which are not among the horses that capitalists are betting on at a given time. Over years I have witnessed first-hand a high-profile and initially very well funded project (Subversion) dwindle, not really because of diminishing user interest (there are still countless companies using SVN internally, ask your friends who work in something other than pure software dev shops, where only a subset of people write software, it is still everywhere there) but because development funding dried up as companies moved on to greener $$$ pastures, and the project, being used to the luxuries of external funding from the very beginning, now finds itself unable to keep operating at a grand scale without external help, and there is no help.
I am not surprised to learn about someone trying the VC route to find required support for gitea, probably with good intentions (and an unfortunate PR disaster that was probably not intended). I myself wouldn't touch such money for community projects, it seems like a very bad fit.