Gitea is FOSS under the MIT license. Is the title just phrased oddly? They do offer hosting for profit but I thought the software met the definition of FOSS.
Gitea is under the MIT license, so FOSS, but the For-Profit managing it could at any point switch the license going forward. For example to lock Features for Self-Hosters behind a Paywall like Gitlab does
That’s the same with any copyleft project though. and we could just fork it if that happened
Depends, if they take outside contributions and do not insist on a CLA then copyleft projects can’t be easily relicensed.
MIT isn’t copyleft
Theoretically yes, in practice a project gains reputation and it’s managers gain skills and experience, so i fork isn’t always migrated to easily and it might be harder to keep it going, look at reddit , having the source code didn’t really help and despite lemmy being in development for years the reddit ecosystem (RES in particular) still has advantages that are important at least to me.
I use Gitea myself and when the big dust up about the backing company came up, I didn’t feel like there was a big enough reason to migrate away from Gitea. Just because they could do something wasn’t enough of a reason for me. Sure it’s great that they are running a fork that I could switch to but I currently don’t see a reason to switch as of today.
Didn’t they try to go FOSS in Germany in the past, but that made Microsoft very unhappy? Didn’t last by memory.
I know of one case where a city has switched over to FOSS software quite successfully. Ultimately the problem in Germany is that everything is decentralized and nobody works together. So instead of the state or country government providing a FOSS solution for the schools needs every single school has to figure it out individually. So they usually end up picking the “easy” option and just pay astronomical prices for Micro$oft Services. I really hope this pilot is successful because frankly the systemic issues causing the lack of FOSS in government funded services will not be solved by anyone in power for the foreseeable future.
The case you’re referring to was the adoption of a Linux based OS (LiMux) by the city administration of Munich - here is the Wikipedia article on the subject.
Unfortunately, Munich totally rolled back Linux adoption for some shady reasons later on:
Microsoft had announced in 2013 its willingness to move its German headquarters to Munich in 2016, which according to Reiter though, is unrelated to the criticism they’ve presented against the LiMux project.
That was the one. The sweetened deal. The golden handshake.
