I understand all of this. I'm a software engineer myself, and FLOSS advocate.
The "complaint" is not that I don't understand _why_ this is happening, or even so much that it _is_ happening, but in my experience, this "commercialisation" of F/L/OSS is inevitably (I'd argue) net negative for the community built around it.
Even if the core product doesn't become "paid" and we don't have this issue of whether or not people _should_ have to pay to use it, the quality of the "core" or "community" product will fall, anything new or interesting will get pay-walled and updates/features will be few and far between.
I'd call this more lamentation of a loss than anything, Gitea isn't dead (yet) because of this, but I move forward cautiously to see what comes of it.
What would be really interesting, would be to revisit this discussion in a year, two, maybe more and see what became of it.
The "complaint" is not that I don't understand _why_ this is happening, or even so much that it _is_ happening, but in my experience, this "commercialisation" of F/L/OSS is inevitably (I'd argue) net negative for the community built around it.
Even if the core product doesn't become "paid" and we don't have this issue of whether or not people _should_ have to pay to use it, the quality of the "core" or "community" product will fall, anything new or interesting will get pay-walled and updates/features will be few and far between.
I'd call this more lamentation of a loss than anything, Gitea isn't dead (yet) because of this, but I move forward cautiously to see what comes of it.
What would be really interesting, would be to revisit this discussion in a year, two, maybe more and see what became of it.