8:43 p.m.
Hi Mark,
Mark Galassi <mark(a)galassi.org> skribis:
With a lot of staff quitting, one thing that might happen is that
the
smaller GNU projects might have to deal with deteriorating
infrastructure. Imagine what would happen if savannah and the mailing
list servers were to go down. The ftp/web server that links to our
projects and documentation might also not be well-maintained.
Note that the infrastructure has been suffering from technical debt for
a long time: Savannah has been showing its age for some time, using CVS
to push web pages has been anachronistic for more than a decade, and
reports from former FSF staff suggests the web infrastructure is not in
a good shape.
It would seem that part of it is because the sysadmin team is
understaffed, but it’s also likely a side effect of the “founder
syndrome”: technical changes having to be approved or at the risk of
being vetoed by RMS.
However, note that day-to-day Savannah admin is handled by volunteers
(notably Bob Proulx, Amin Bandali, and Ineiev). Ticket handling can be
seen at <https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/savannah-hackers/>;.
This is a practical rather than a foundational aspect of the matter
at
hand. The foundational matters are also very important: what happens
to stewardship of the GPL and to projects that have "GPL v[23] or
later as published by the FSF" in their license statement? That's for
a separate thread. Same goes for fiscal sponsorship.
Yeah…
On the practical side:
The business of running an IT shop for GNU projects is non-trivial.
Some projects have their own (like the project that kindly donates
this list), but that's less ambitious than a turn-key system for many
loosely connected projects.
My collaborator Allison mentioned some possible replacements for
project s/w infrastructure, and I'll copy that info here just to get
some talk going.
Thanks for sharing these free software friendly options!
Sourcehut <https://sr.ht/> is also often mentioned as a viable friendly
project hosting platform.
Longer-term, hosting the relevant services at gnu.tools seems like a
reasonable option. Of course, it means there must be volunteers taking
care of it; but if this “new GNU” is to grow beyond a certain critical
mass, it’s doable. Self-hosting is also very much in line, I think,
with the autonomy message that GNU is sending.
Ludo’.