I think there's pros and cons to everything. That way would have been less of a dickhead move towards the Forgejo developers. But a big letdown to admins as they don't know what's up with the software they're running on their servers. The way the author chose gives some new intelligence to admins, and they can now act on it, since it's public knowledge. But it's annoying to the devs.

I guess I as a Forgejo user am kinda greatful they did it this way. Now I got to learn the story and can allocate 2h on the weekend to see if my personal Forgejo container is isolated enough and whether the backups still work.

(But that's just my opinion after reading one side of the story. Maybe there's more to the story and they're being a dick nonetheless...)

Edit: And regarding just dropping the security team an informal mail... I don't know if that's clever. You'd normally either follow some security policy, or don't engage. Sending them other kinds of mails which violate their policy (an internal carrot) might not be the best choice.

Your comment said Forgejo has a disclosure process. The article says the author went with a carrot disclosure after reading the disclosure process and making a value judgement. Because your comment only mentioned Forgejo having a disclosure process, not an evaluation of the author’s evaluation of the disclosure process, it made you appear as if you had not read the article.

In your response to me calling that out, you offer an analysis. The author is lazy for using carrot disclosure over the defined disclosure process. That’s a valid take. I’m not going to disagree with that.