Nothing cynical about that statement. We definitely want to preserve the star counts! But as the founder of Drone, and Head of Product for Gitness, I see Gitness as the next major version of Drone. Gitness is built on the Drone pipeline engine and uses significant amounts of Drone code. And in the coming months, when you upgrade to the latest version of Drone you will get Gitness. So to me, they are one and the same.
I get that you feel that they're the same, and that makes sense since you founded both projects. But what is publicly visible communicates something very different.
For example, the press release entitled "Harness Releases Gitness" is clearly describing the release of a new Harness product, not a rebranding of Drone [0]. And your README doesn't say anything like "Gitness is Drone 3.0", it says it's "powered by Drone".
You also didn't merge in a branch that built Gitness on top of Drone. Instead there's one commit that removes every single line of Drone code [1] and then another one that adds all of Gitness [2]. There's no continuity in the history between Drone and Gitness; Gitness effectively originates in one big "Initial commit" that just happens to be in the same GitHub repo as Drone used to be.
Two thirds of those stars were earned before Harness even acquired Drone [3], and it feels weird to me to see them used to push Harness's strategic move into Git hosting, even if that move is led by Drone's founder.
