To elaborate a bit more; first things first - Gitea is still MIT and open source. Not open core, full open source.
The main reason for Forgejo is moreso that Gitea as a project was taken over by a company instead of being run as a non-profit. Some of the dev team felt uncomfortable with that and forked it.
Personally I haven't seen much reason to switch from Gitea to Forgejo - this is the sort of ideological issue that I'd rather kick the can down the road on until Gitea Ltd goes bad (and in an assumption of good faith, I'll assume that it won't.)
It's not that difficult to move git repositories around after all.
The ideological difference between the two projects really shows on their landing pages. Forgejo has a cute fox drawn by a real artist whose name is credited in the website's footer; Gitea has AI-generated images of a robot in the clouds or in a skyline (it becomes really obvious when you look close)
Indeed. And the cute fox almost doesn't need the credits. When you recognize David Revoy's style on a project page, you know the project is probably a community-driven effort, and is worth checking out if you value that.
