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Loïc Dachary
The Gitea Ltd company took over the @Gitea project. The domains & trademark, previously under the governance of elected community leaders are now owned by a for-profit corporation based in Hong Kong. I work daily on the Gitea codebase as part of my efforts to further forge federation in @forgefriends and did not get any advance warning, just as most volunteer contributors. I would welcome, use, contribute and support a fork of Gitea with a healthy governance. 22 comments
Loïc Dachary
Lunny was the legitimate owner of the trademark and the domain because he was elected by the community. Under the promise to transfer ownership to future elected owners. Gitea Ltd has not been elected by community members and yet, it now owns both. As a consequence, the domains and trademark are no longer under the governance of the Gitea community. https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#owners
Gitea
@dachary @forgefriends Again, false. The trademark and domains have never been owned by the project. He has never promised to transfer them to any future owners.
Loïc Dachary
This is literally what the Gitea documentation reads: > When the new owners have been elected, the old owners will give up ownership to the newly elected owners. It does not say "except for the domain and the trademark" which are two very significant assets (if not the most significant) a Free Software project owns. https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#owners
Gitea
@Bobo_PK @dachary @forgefriends lots of notifications today, and this response was missed. thanks for the ping Bobo_PK. The reference in the document is about the project itself, not anyone's personal assets. 
Sven Slootweg
@gitea @dachary@mastodon.online This sure is starting to sound an awful lot like the arguments Andrew Lee made in his hostile takeover of Freenode. 
Steven Roose
@dachary @forgefriends Why is claiming copyright still so common in open source software projects? Why don't these projects give their trademarks and copy right to the public domain so that these kinds of hijacks can't happen? Thinking the whole #Jabber / #XMPP debacle. The code might be free to copy, but it's kinda tedious if you have to come up with a new name for the same community-driven project while some single for-profit party snitches the trademarks.
Loïc Dachary
@stevenroose @forgefriends I'm all in favor of DCO (Developer Certificate of Origin) instead of a single organization running the project owning all the copyright. I've been told that a number of companies requiring CLA (Contributor License Agreement) changed their views on the matter. Because they keep piling up and lawyers need to deal with them forever 😃 
mmu_man
@stevenroose @dachary @forgefriends you can't just "give copyright to the public domain", you need an entity legally able to defend them against abuse, either a person, a corp or a foundation…
Loïc Dachary
@stevenroose @forgefriends trademark is a different topic though. I'm not aware of any way to declare a trademark to be in the public domain. The only way to achieve that is for the trademark to be used during years by a large number of third parties without any objection from the owner of the trademark. In other words, if left undefended for long enough a trademark de-facto falls in the public domain as it becomes increasingly difficult for the owner to go to court after years of neglect.
Steven Roose
@dachary @forgefriends I mean if you invent a name and a logo and attribute it to the public domain, no one else can register it as a trademark, right? You just need to timestamp the time of invention (#OpenTimestamps and Twitter or something) and any party being sued by someone falsely claiming the copyright/trademark should be able to defend themselves using that. 
Simon Poole
@stevenroose @dachary @forgefriends No, this is totally not how it works. There is literally no protection against anybody from registering an unprotected 'word' as a trademark, outside of the restrictions that apply to them in general (not descriptive etc.). Which is why you will see not only corps but large non-profits registering and defending their marks quite vigorously. 
Nemo_bis 🌈
@dachary @forgefriends To reduce the risk of such hostile takeovers by for-profit entities, remember to host the fork's assets with a trusted non-profit org. Examples: 
iced quinn
@dachary @forgefriends
> used by blender > because phabricator died > phabricator died :blobcatnotlikethis2: NO
Zoe :verified_trans:
@dachary@mastodon.online @Gitea@mastodon.online @forgefriends@mastodon.online i havent really worked with gitea so dont think i would be the best to fork, but seeing as you have been involved a lot perhaps you could start such a fork? i would love to help with it
Kerfuffle
@dachary @forgefriends Gitea's own explanation makes this sound a lot less sinister.
Julian
@dachary @forgefriends "an enhanced enterprise version", seems like they are going down the same rabbit hole, as gitlab 
Elias Mårtenson
@dachary @forgefriends what they said seemed to make sense and wasn't very unreasonable. Until the part about cryptocurrency garbage myst made me complete lose any confidence I have in those people wanting to be good maintainers of this project.
scm
@dachary @forgefriends Holy cats! I really liked that the Gitea project was a free alternative to GitHub and other proprietary Git companies. I'm not in a position to support a fork financially but I'm willing to help out in other ways. |
Gregory's Server
@dachary @forgefriends
> The domains & trademark, previously under the governance of elected community leaders
This is false, the domains and trademark have always been Lunnys. Please stop spreading FUD.