Open source maintenance and the future of Gitea

Open source maintenance and the future of Gitea

Tuesday, October 25, 2022 by techknowlogick

With Gitea At age 6, it’s time to look back and look to the future. With over 14k+ commits, 1k+ contributors, 40+ maintainers, and 300M+ Docker Hub pulls, Gitea has come a long way.

Our most important goal is to ensure the long-term success of the project. Over the years, we have tried various ways to support maintainers and projects. Some of the ways we’ve tried include bounties, direct donations, grants, and a few others. We found that while there are many great individuals and some very generous companies whose support we are very grateful for, there are still companies (with revenues that exceed the GDP of certain countries) that are building Gitea for the core product without even offering feedback enhancements Function. This is of course within the license, but will prevent others in the community from benefiting as well.

We would like to announce that we have established a company called Gitea Limited to ensure that our goals are met. Some companies cannot give back to open source through sponsorships or code contributions. More people can’t sign up with individuals due to internal policies. In creating this new company, we are now able to support companies that want to give back.

The Gitea project will of course remain an open source and community project. The company will now be able to act as a housekeeper, so Lunny has transferred his domain name and trademark to the company. So far, we’ve been able to support The Blender Foundation using Gitea to develop Blender and a few other organizations. Additionally, we have been able to provide part-time jobs for some maintainers and look forward to being able to expand this to full-time jobs and hire more maintainers. Additionally, we plan to establish a fund to be able to support contributors who contribute not only features but also bug fixes, performance enhancements, and important refactorings.

To protect the community aspect of Gitea, we are trying to create a decentralized autonomous organization where contributors will receive benefits based on their participation, such as code , documentation, translations, and maybe even help individual community members with support issues.

If you are a company and rely on Gitea, especially for critical operations, please contact us as we are now able to provide:

continuedImprovedGitea 😉