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by shp0ngle 1286 days ago
Well gitea itself is a fork of a different project, because of some other founder drama (that I forgot honestly). So it’s fine.
2 comments

There was no drama as far as I recall, just complaints that he wasn't agile enough or something like that. The different project is Gogs https://gogs.io/ and its author is Joe Chen ('unknwon').
From what I recall the drama was that the split was timed to his absence and they announced everywhere that "Gogs is dead/unmaintained" until he came back and set the record straight.

The reason for the split was understandable, them going around proclaiming Gogs dead and unmaintained felt pretty scummy to me, however.

The drama was that the original project's maintainer had full control and would go absent for weeks/months leaving the project in limbo, and refused to share the maintainer burden with anyone (including refusing features he disliked).
> refused to share … (including refusing features he disliked)

That makes the maintainer of Gogs sound rather petty, which I don't think is true. It is their project, they don't have to give control to anyone else if they don't want to, or implement features that they don't want.

A number of projects are explicitly “open source, not open contribution” and this is perfectly OK. If it is a problem for other individuals or “the community” than there is always the fork option (as taken by Gitea and now Forgejo) or if that isn't practical maybe offering to pay the maintainer, so can afford to make time to bother more with needs/wants away from their own (though in the latter case, don't be offended if this is politely rebuffed also).

> and refused to share the maintainer burden with anyone (including refusing features he disliked).

I realize gogs is MIT license which is subject to easy fork. To avoid a fork when using such license, you have few options. One is fully feature your product, the other is expect your product to require domain specific skills that makes fork less trivial to move on; file format, data manipulation, etc.

So I wondered if original maintainer really wanted to avoid the fork, or simply don't care. It would be interesting to hear.