I guess out of fear that we get another gitlab situation, where the open source offering has a load of key features eventually kept behind a paywall

At some point they will do a Redis or Terraform and say no more open source, pay us to use it.

All contributions are now owned by us and not by the person who wrote it.

As the other commenter already said it's an abundance of caution. GItea is already moving in the direction of SaaS and an easily self-hostable solution runs counter to that plan (Gitea is already offering a managed Cloud so this is not a hypothetical). One thing that has already happened is Gitea introducing a Contributor License Agreement, effectively allowing them to change the license of the code at any time.

If it helps, it's supposed to be a drop-in replacement.

Same. It’s been on my list for too long.

I think for now Forgejo is a drop-in replacement. However since they are a hard-fork, at some point in the future they will diverge enough to be mutually incompatible, so the clock is ticking on migrating.

Perhaps not a takeover so much as a betrayal, a backstabbing? Certainly hostile to the community.

Could you please provide some sources for that? I'd like to know more.

First of all though, there is no such thing as a "hostile fork". Being able to fork a project, for any reason, is the entire point of open source. And to be fair, not wanting to continue working for a for-profit company for free is a very good reason.

And yeah, when you suddenly turn a FOSS project that's been developed with the help of a bunch of contributors, into a for-profit company, without making a big fuss about it beforehand and allow the contributors and community to weigh in, then yeah, that's a hostile takeover of sorts, at least in my opinion. Developers gotta make money, but they could've done that by creating a new brand instead of taking over that of a previously completely FOSS project. Forgejo is preventing that exact thing from happening by joining Codeberg (a non-profit).

In 2022, maintainers (...) founded the company Gitea Limited with the goal of offering hosting services using (proprietary) versions of Gitea. (...). The shift away from a community ownership model received some resistance from some contributors, which led to the formation of a software fork called Forgejo. From Wikipedia.

It's also ahead of gitea in some aspects: https://forgejo.org/faq/#is-there-a-roadmap-for-forgejo

Doesn't matter if those features are doomed to be locked behind a paywall shortly

If you have a place to host Forgejo/Gitea, you have a place to store a Git server. Set it up like this:

$ git clone --bare myrepo myrepo.bare
$ scp -r myrepo.bare srv:
$ cd myrepo
$ git remote add origin srv:myrepo.bare
# or
$ git remote set-url origin srv:myrepo.bare

Now git push etc work similar to GitHub, but you're using your server (named srv in SSH config, as shown in my previous post) as the remote storage.

Selfhosted Gitea is a way to get a wiki, bug tracker or whatnot - collaborate, for example, but it's not necessary to have a Git server for your personal use.

After dealing with tcl errors trying to test sqlite, I feel I've never seen a more scathing criticism of fossil.

I love love love that Fossil is a single executable.

All in all, the version control wars have ended and git has won. Mercurial is another one I sort of wanna try just to see what it's like.

Re: rebasing, I think squashing / rebasing (in place of merging) is bad but I am also one of the few people I know who tries to make a good history with good commit messages prior to opening a pull request by using interactive rebasing. (This topic is confusing to talk about because I have to say "I don't rebase, instead o rebase" which can be confusing.)