I recently learned what a DAO is and I simply don't understand what purpose a "decentralized autonomous organization" could serve here. What am I missing? Python, FreeBSD, Debian etc etc have foundations/boards, hold elections and make decisions without anything so complex.

A DAO is much more like a cooperative. The complexity comes from the value distribution and vote models.

That said, you don't need crypto for that, just well made processes.

It's really a shame that an entire category of software and organizational practices have been smeared because of "the crypto phenomenon".

Welcome to the trough of disillusionment. It will pass.

"Smart contracts" are a defining feature of DAOs. "Smart contracts" are not something that are offered outside of cryptocurrency / blockchain platforms. No one has found a viable use for blockchains that cannot be better solved in other means except as massive vehicles for scams.

Any organization that tries to implement a DAO / smart contract system for governance is asking for trouble, because they’re legally unsound and untested.

As far as organizational structures are concerned, there are plenty of viable structures and legal sorts of entities that can be used. (Gitea Ltd might be able to fix a lot of the goodwill issues by switching to a B corp structure or even to a legal cooperative structure.)

Then just make a cooperative organization. There are legal means for doing so in most jurisdictions. There’s absolutely no need to use a term that makes no sense without cryptoscams and hackable "smart" contracts.

This premise of a DAO is that votes are the only thing that ultimately matter, which can make things simpler. Something gets presented as a course of action, a vote happens, and the if enough votes qualify you make the action. In a crypto DAO, this voting is implemented in the blockchain's software rules as a contract; thus, it is completely automated. Sometimes, to the dismay of the users. But, there is nothing requiring you to do this in software. It just means they want, in theory, that you'll somehow be able to have a vote without being required to be known or involved directly.

If the DAO isn't implemented in software using smart contracts, then what is the difference with a "traditional" foundation like e.g. Debian or Python have?

Why use the term DAO when it is essentially everyone has a vote ? I would think a COOp would be a better choice of words. Using a DAO would give negative connotations when you aren’t issuing a token .

It's not "everyone has a vote". Some have more voting powers than others: "provides contributors with greater participation to have more votes"

Typically you can expect Gitea Ltd. employees to have greater participation.

> The answer is bluntly; no.

I share the same conclusion. It is time to fork.

> time to fork.

Knew you'd come around. Now I just need Rapnie from the other day to put their blessing on it and we can call this a done deal.

"Gitea Ltd. will be open to building special versions for special clients and will contribute any features back to the main repository when possible" pretty much means that they won't contribute back everything. That's what you get when contributing to MIT licensed code.

The way I read it is "company x has some internal system that they want to integrate with gitea" Where it may not make sense to contribute it back.

You make it sound like people contributing to MIT licensed code are oblivious to that. I'm perfectly fine with anyone doing whatever they want or I wouldn't have chosen MIT. They don't owe me anything.

Fair enough. The initial reaction to the company creation still makes me think that in this case, some community contributors feel like they got the short end of the stick. Clearly not the sketchiest part of these events, but maybe food for thought when considering contributing to a project that may go commercial at some point.

It can be taken as complaining but I see it as they are just trying the civil communication route before doing something like a gpl fork that's all. It's the opposite of unreasonable or bad behavior.

You can do the same thing with GPL-licensed code. Only the recipient of GPL-ed code has a right to get the source code, not the public at large. Unless the recipient wants to redistribute the code, Copyleft makes little difference.

Copyleft makes all the difference.

In the case of server-side components, yes. That's why the AGPL exists

But the people on internet told me MIT means more freedom than GNU coz you can do more things with code! /s

With GPL, source code only needs to be shared to the parties the software is distributed to.

A company-internal software can have as much GPL as they want, they don't need to publish any source code. So yeah, MIT and GPL would have exactly the same outcome.

> But the people on internet told me MIT means more freedom than GNU coz you can do more things with code! /s

Why /s? You literally and unironically can do more things with permissive code than copyleft. Amongst those things are "incorporate it into proprietary software" and "make a closed-source fork or distribution". That's the point.

to be honest I don't even want SAP integration in my gitea

But on a serious note: this whole thing is kind of a PR disaster which could have been avoided with better communication