Based on those meeting notes, the conflict of interest that arises when attempting to add features that compete with paid ones is real. So its that ideology that it is actually needed for a Government user/contributor.
To this day anything of worth that's been added to Gitea is released under MIT. Their business model is: you pay us to develop the features we need, we release them for everybody, which is how their collaboration with Blender has been working thus far. If it's good enough for Blender, who decided to stay with Gitea, it's good enough for me.
Not sure: the government could just buy Gitea Enterprise license right? And thereby not really run true 'open source' software, but it would support the main development behind Gitea.
There's a batch of dialog that indicates an interest in 'digital sovereignty', so it sounds like they are less interested in being an explicit customer of a given company.
My point was that you don't need to compete with paid features, just please give the developers money to develop the software further (and fix bugs/issues), so e.g. buy some 'enterprise license', even if you don't need it in terms of features.
