In the end all of us have to pay the bills.
Seems like they’re just adopting a common model of free open source offerings but with the carrot of enterprise management.
Those guys for years and years have been developing a free tool getting almost nothing back in return. Morally there is nothing wrong about this.
And if you think you can do better for free and keep everything open source, you can always contribute to the fork and keep enjoying it.
Who knows if Forgejo can pull off the technical side, which I do plan to contribute to, but at least they have clear principles.
I think the gatekeept features are indeed for enterprises and individual users aren’t affected too much. If you’re a company and use Gitea, it would be nice to pay. One thing I don’t know is whether enterprise customers get to review the source code.