I am curious about how Gitea (which is a great product) is made, behind the scene.
There is an OpenCollective page but with ~4K€ spent over the years… it’s clearly not used to pay developer salaries There are sponsors listed and maybe some core developers are employed by them and generously allowed to work full time on Gitea? And maybe some of the most active developers are volunteers who dedicate hours of their time daily to advance Gitea (I very much admire that kind of commitment).
Last but not least I’m curious about the decision process. I suppose the core developers communicate somehow (but I did not find where) about what they find more important to work on at any given point in time. Or just to make sure they don’t step on each other toes? I also suppose the admins have a special status within the Gitea project and are empowered with … governance maybe? Finances?
As Gitea becomes increasingly popular I’m sure I’m not the only one curious about that and it would be great if there was a page somewhere, or even just an answer to this topic, from someone knowledgeable on the matter.
I also take this opportunity to applaud the collective efforts of everyone involved: not only is it a great product, it also is truly Free Software and that’s something I really need
I think you can read CONTRIBUTING.md at first. I think almost all of maintainers are volunteers and the most important decisions are made by three owners which are elected from maintainers every year. We have maintainers channel to discuss when we should release. We also have a develop channel to communite with non-maintainer contributors. And feature freeze decision will be posted in develop channel.
There are sponsors listed and maybe some core developers are employed by them and generously allowed to work full time on Gitea? And maybe some of the most active developers are volunteers who dedicate hours of their time daily to advance Gitea (I very much admire that kind of commitment).
and that’s something I really need 
