I've been donating to Gitea for years (on their Open Collective [1]) but if they start with this cryptocurrency/blockchain stuff, I am out. I am trying to fund development, not invest unstable currency technology.
Gitea itself started as a fork of Gogs, it wouldn't be too surprising to see it fork again if they start being creative with the brand.
I've also been a contributor to Gitea, but it's not time yet to call the banners.
I don't think this announcement was handled particularly well, but nonetheless, I think it's an important development for gitea to grow and become sustainable.
Specifically, Gitea is in desperate need of full-time maintainers (and probably a part-time project manager), and I see this as an essential step to creating the necessary governance for that.
I remain cautiously optimistic and would encourage everyone who is passionate about the project to raise their concerns and wishes in a constructive way. Another fork would be a disaster for the entire ecosystem and I think should only happen if there really are SIGNIFICANTLY diverging interests in the project.
I also haven't heard anything in the gitea threads about crypto, so I think they're just referring to bounties and other distributed payments.
I have nothing against creating a company. It's probably a good development, unless that company does something really weird like shilling blockchain stuff. Having professional support is great and makes sense since both GitLab and GitHub have managed on-premise options too.
I'm confused, they don't mention crypto. This blog post is simply an announcement that they started a company. The purpose seems to mainly be for providing support services and paying developers. I see absolutely nothing wrong with that.
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.
I don't think a DAO is just cryptocurrency adjacent. A DAO is entirely about trading traditional, well known, corporate structures (boards, shares, Robert's Rules, ballot voting) and replacing them all with cryptocurrency structures (NFT
token holders, NFT tokens, "Smart" Contracts, more "Smart" Contracts). There is no DAO without cryptocurrency. There's no token trading or smart contract operations without trading in whatever cryptocoins underpin their DAO's platform of choice. If you think all cryptocoins are a scam to shill in one way or another, there's no DAO operations at all without shilling at least one scam cryptocoin (and usually there's more than one involved on every current platform that supports "smart" contracts).
Meanwhile there are existing open-source foundations and conservancies that operate just fine as traditional (not-for-profit) corporations and no need for a DAO or any cryptocurrencies for community governance.
Whatever the official purpose is going to be, there will be lots of people trading the relevant token and people who got it first are going to cash out during one of the many pump and dumps. And the "why aren't you collaborating with (whatever Web3 project)" / "why aren't you promoting the token more" spam will start too. I've seen it before and it's not going to be pretty.
Recently I researched a little bit about this Gogs and Gitea situation. Here's what I've got: Gogs is maintained by a single person. He was reluctant to accept external contributions, so Gitea was forked. Now Gitea is very active with lots of contributors and more features, but Gogs is still maintained and does have many necessary features.
We were migrating from GitLab, so I considered to install Gogs, we decided to go with GitHub unfortunately.
The term DAO as it's used now is orthogonal to blockchain and crypto.
It's mostly a term to describe codified governance/community systems. There may be point systems implemented via crypto tokens, but in the vast majority of cases those would be better implemented on centralized ledgers since there's someone with centralized control over either the token issuance, the communication channels, or other essential resources.
If they were developed now, Stack Overflow and Wikipedia would be considered DAOs.
That would just indicate the term 'DAO' doesn't mean anything at all.
I'm unable to find an actual example of anything calling itself a DAO which doesn't also play with cryptocurrency tokens, so I'm pretty sure the term isn't used outside of that fanbase.
Stack Overflow was developed as (and is still operated as) a for-profit/profit-motivated Corporation (Stack Exchange Inc.). No one considers it a DAO in any form, especially not the "autonomous" part. Unless you mean the gamified community elements, but you can't really call that an "organization" either because it's entirely disorganized (and sometimes highly dysfunctional) beyond the game mechanics and more importantly extremely centralized to Stack Overflow's servers.
Wikipedia is run as a not-for-profit Foundation (Wikimedia Foundation). It doesn't seem anything like DAO either. Again, unless you mean the community of contributors to Wikipedia, and that also is extremely centralized to Wikipedia servers and doesn't have anything resembling "autonomous", not even something resembling Stack Overflow's game mechanics.
The "autonomous" in DAO still only means "smart contracts" and no one is using DAO as a term for traditional corporate structures other than those intentionally confused by or wishing to confuse what "autonomous" means in the acronym.
Hi, I'm the author of the post. That is correct, I mentioned a DAO as a possible way we are investigating for empowering the community, we are very much not trying to make a new currency.
This is prejudice. DAO in its most fundamental terms is transparent auctioning, staked decision-making, et cetera; in other words, totally valid set of use cases for the purpose of managing an open source project out in the open. Perhaps one of the few cases that. One of the accidental benefits of running it in crypto is the ability to consider rewards irrespective of jurisdictions. Think contributors being rewarded for carrying out a feature, on release, in effect immediately, irrespective of where they're coming from. It could be some poor girl from Iran, or Venezuela who otherwise wouldn't be able to partake due to restrictions re: Visa/Mastercard imposed but could make some money here doing open source work. Yes, much of the blockchain space is occupied by scams but sometimes it just makes sense, especially if you're willing to take a walk outside of your average "institutional" frame of logic.
That's not something a serious, registered company would risk given known sanctions against Iran. A random scam dao maybe doesn't care, but I suspect gitea does.
Serious, registered company wouldn't know— who is that on the receiving end of the bargain and therefore can't be held responsible for it; that's exactly the point why this technology is so beautiful and why it will ultimately prevail.
That's not how law works, you can't just look the other way. If you distribute money to random people without restrictions, records, or knowing who they are, that's called money laundering. That's what crypto tumblers are.
The fun part is: "CFTC’s order first finds that virtual currencies traded on the bZx Protocol, including ETH and DAI, are “commodities” under the CEA.", which is close to "It's cute you set up your daos and automated protocols, but legally that's irrelevant."
Regarding ignoring the identity: "The order further finds that the Ooki DAO failed to adopt a customer identification program, in violation of the Bank Secrecy Act and the Commission regulations promulgated thereunder."
So they settled, interesting! Sad it didn't go to court, could have made a curious precedent. This is different, however (although I haven't done much legal work in this space) as it's an investment open source DAO can be structured in a way that does not have clear beneficiary structure and as long as the primary software developer can show that they can't exert ultimate control of the network, it's all for nil. (Now that's a whole different kettle of fish!) You have things like GNU Taler potentially being able to map the existing irl ownership structures quite closely, and all kinds of ZKP, Shamir-based stuff on the end of the spectrum where it all breaks down. I allude to the latter, which would make sense (technically using a mixer would constitute money laundering in the spirit of the law but we don't see people get charged with it, never. And doing so would set a disturbing precedent. If you're starting with some primary shareholder, you're probably doing DAO wrong, and it then becomes less decentralised and more like crypto cosplay on the prior structure.
Gitea itself started as a fork of Gogs, it wouldn't be too surprising to see it fork again if they start being creative with the brand.
[1]: https://opencollective.com/gitea