throwaccount12

I am an outsider as well, and I researched the person who wrote this letter, and he has a company that sells Gitea and is not a maintainer. This letter is in bad faith like you said.

I find it very interesting how the person who put together this open letter has a company they started to sell Gitea, and is not even a maintainer of Gitea. So he hasn't even voted. Seems like a very suspicious conflict of interest that should be taken into account, and is very likely acting in bad faith.

Interesting that you forgot to mention the company YOU started to sell Gitea, even after multiple opportunities to mention it. I also checked the maintainer list, you have mentioned democracy many times in this thread, but yet you have not voted, nor maintain gitea.

By not mentioning this major conflict brings your motives into suspicion.

AGPL has a bad reputation because it has been weaponized against the community from companies like Elastic.

I went to their profile, and also followed the link they posted to the public donations to connect them.

> What you said is false. I suspect that is why you're getting downvoted.

It's not, you can confirm what I said. Look at the link in the blog post that points to public mention of it months ago, as well as the user I replied to posts about the company to his personal site with excepts from the public matrix channel.

I'm active in open source and lots of chat happens in matrix, maybe your coworker missed it?

Indeed I have been active. I am passionate about funding in open source, and saw someone link this on mastodon, and so I signed up to comment on things. I only know what has been said in the blog post. I have attempted to disclose all my leanings, and follow ddevault [0] and disclose especially around crypto things

> Additionally, we’re planning on establishing a fund to be able to provide support to contributors who not only contribute features, but also bug fixes, performance enhancements, and important refactors.

Sounds like occasional contributors can receive payment as well.

Like you, I also agree that financial disclosures and citing sources are important, and so so that is why I took the 5 seconds to validate a claim someone made, and also found someone in this thread who very clearly is not disclosing a financial stake in the matter.

Edit: I have seen a maintainer in this thread, perhaps he could share some more details as they come.

[0]: https://drewdevault.com/2021/04/26/Cryptocurrency-is-a-disas...

An enterprise version could be something like RHEL does where it's FIPS compliant or something.

The DAO was mentioned only around transparent governance and giving back to the community, but the blog post mentions hiring maintainers presumably with cash.

Maybe this new company can pay for a designer

I took a look at Gitea's Open Collective, and they have something like $300 coming in each month, and that there is a large amount in the account because of a few large companies, but not re-occurring ones.

> The entire community

The blog post says maintainers have been hired, as well as the Blender blog post is months old, seems like this has been public knowledge for a while, but that it is just formally being announced now.

Edit: seems I am getting downvoted, but I searched dachary who has a financial interest in Gitea, and has posted about the company in the past, so he clearly has known about this for a while.

I wonder why he happens to not mention a conflict.

You say "one of the larger contributors upstream" do you have a source for that? Because I took a look at the contributor list, and couldn't find any evidence of that.

Is it? The blog post calls out their participation with Blender, and reading the linked blender posts and videos where they talk about their work with the company they talk about the relationship being entirely about providing advice and support, I don't think blender bought some closed source software.

It does mention DAO, which is crypto adjacent, however like you said the purpose listed in the post is to provide paid support services, the DAO is for governance of the community, not to shill some scam crypto coin.

Lots of focus on the DAO mention in the post, but it looking at the concrete things in the blog post instead of some "experiment", there are direct funding models of selling hosting, support services, training and more. The DAO is likely just a way to make the governance of the community more transparent, but I think people are confusing it with creating a crypto coin.

I hold zero crypto, but by reading of the DAO is that it is one of the ways mentioned of trying to benefit the community or perhaps it will be used for community governance (elsewhere in the post it mentions hiring maintainers, and also creating bounties to fund development), not a way of creating some crypto coin to sell.

I read it as, a way to provide benefits from the company to contributors, but the blog post also mentions other ways of funding the community

I mean, that's part of the model mentioned in the post above (Instance Hosting/SaaS).