Origins and Development of Gitea | Generated by AI
Question: Who made Gitea, especially the self-hosted version?
Answer:
Origins: Gogs → Gitea
Gitea did not start from scratch. It originated as a fork of Gogs in 2016. While Gogs was open-source, its repository was controlled by a single maintainer. This single-maintainer bottleneck frustrated contributors who wanted faster development and a more open governance model.
In response to these limitations, the Gitea developers decided to fork Gogs in November 2016, creating a community-driven development model. Gitea had its official 1.0 release in December 2016.
Who Made It
The key figures behind Gitea are:
- Lunny Xiao — one of the original core developers and maintainers of Gitea, and previously involved with Gogs.
- Matti Ranta — another core maintainer.
In October 2022, maintainers Lunny Xiao and Matti Ranta founded the company Gitea Limited with the goal of offering hosting services using specialized versions of Gitea that were not released as open-source. This commercialization move caused controversy in the community.
Beyond these founders, Gitea is developed under a community-driven development model, meaning it has many open-source contributors across the world, not just a single owner.
What Is It (Self-Hosted)
Gitea is a painless, self-hosted, all-in-one software development service. It includes Git hosting, code review, team collaboration, package registry, and CI/CD. It is similar to GitHub, Bitbucket, and GitLab.
The goal of the project is to make the easiest, fastest, and most painless way of setting up a self-hosted Git service. As Gitea is written in Go, it works across all the platforms and architectures that are supported by Go, including Linux, macOS, and Windows on x86, amd64, ARM, and PowerPC architectures.
It is free, self-hosted, and licensed under the MIT license, giving users full control, unlimited users and repositories.
The Forgejo Fork (Community Reaction)
In response to the founding of Gitea Limited and its non-open-source specialized versions, Codeberg — one of the major forges using Gitea at the time — forked Gitea into Forgejo. Forgejo is now a popular purely community-driven alternative for those who want a 100% open governance model.
Summary Table
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Original fork from | Gogs (November 2016) |
| Key founders | Lunny Xiao, Matti Ranta |
| Language | Go + TypeScript |
| License | MIT |
| Company | Gitea Limited (founded 2022) |
| Community fork | Forgejo (by Codeberg) |
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