Wow, that must really sting. They literally stole his creation. He shouldn't have released it under a permissive license if he's not willing to collaborate.
So first of all, no one stole anything. Wether the author should have released this under a permissive license or not is a different debate. However, he did, so no stealing, literally.
The author is also not unwilling to collaborate. Just look at the history of accepted PRs for example. However, he is unwilling to give others wider access and control over the direction of Gogs (which is totally his right):
> This happened not before trying to convince @Unknwon about giving write permissions to more people, among the community. He rightly considered Gogs his own creature and didn’t want to let it grow outside of him, thus a fork was necessary in order to set that code effectively free.
As to whether it stings I'm not sure. They had conversations around this topic and the conclusion was that a fork was what's needed for what (part of) the community wanted. Though it's possible for the original author to see this as a slap in the face I hope he sees it more as a huge testament to what he's achieved with Gogs so far.
The original author has absolutely no duty to be willing to collaborate or to spend X amount of time on his project (which seems to be the bigger issue here, project blew up while the creator has less time for it), permissive license or not. He can run his project however he likes. And with the permissive license, those that disagree can run their fork however they like. No stealing or bad blood necessary.
> In my point of view, it's a sign of success of Gogs that Gitea forked it. Gogs is under MIT license and there is no problem with me totally that Gitea is developing its own version. It happens often in open source community(when you are not satisfied with upstream version, I fork a lot actually). [0]
The author is also not unwilling to collaborate. Just look at the history of accepted PRs for example. However, he is unwilling to give others wider access and control over the direction of Gogs (which is totally his right):
> This happened not before trying to convince @Unknwon about giving write permissions to more people, among the community. He rightly considered Gogs his own creature and didn’t want to let it grow outside of him, thus a fork was necessary in order to set that code effectively free.
As to whether it stings I'm not sure. They had conversations around this topic and the conclusion was that a fork was what's needed for what (part of) the community wanted. Though it's possible for the original author to see this as a slap in the face I hope he sees it more as a huge testament to what he's achieved with Gogs so far.