I'll wait to jump ship until I see who buys them. It could end up being a huge positive for a gitlab. I have been very disappointed in their strategy the past few years and I think they squandered an enormous opportunity and amount of Goodwill with developers. If they got bought by somebody good, then I think it could end up being a massive positive.
I used Gitlab at a previous job maybe four years ago and really liked the UI. Switching to Github at the new gig felt like a huge step backwards. That said, the product and business news I have seen regarding Gitlab since then has almost all been negative. Hopefully they are able to turn things around because at one point I really hoped they would overtake Github and thought it might happen.
To elaborate a bit more; first things first - Gitea is still MIT and open source. Not open core, full open source.
The main reason for Forgejo is moreso that Gitea as a project was taken over by a company instead of being run as a non-profit. Some of the dev team felt uncomfortable with that and forked it.
Personally I haven't seen much reason to switch from Gitea to Forgejo - this is the sort of ideological issue that I'd rather kick the can down the road on until Gitea Ltd goes bad (and in an assumption of good faith, I'll assume that it won't.)
It's not that difficult to move git repositories around after all.
The ideological difference between the two projects really shows on their landing pages. Forgejo has a cute fox drawn by a real artist whose name is credited in the website's footer; Gitea has AI-generated images of a robot in the clouds or in a skyline (it becomes really obvious when you look close)
Indeed. And the cute fox almost doesn't need the credits. When you recognize David Revoy's style on a project page, you know the project is probably a community-driven effort, and is worth checking out if you value that.
For years, "self-hosting" Gitea wasn't done because it was missing a bunch of useful collaboration features. Now, it looks like that gap has been closed. All of the specific features mentioned in that issue seem to have been fixed, and the big remaining task is figuring out below to actually migrate all the existing data out of GitHub -- which doesn't seem to be super high on the priority list.
