2:21 p.m.
Dear GNU maintainers in the assembly,
The disarray in the FSF gets worse. The zdnet article seemed to me to be well written:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-free-software-foundations-leadership-cr...
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.
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.
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.
(stuff below is copied)
One quick and easy option for the infrastructure is:
https://opendev.org/
They only do infrastructure for free software, and nothing else. I
suspect the GNU maintainers will feel at home with their mission
statement "Free software needs free tools", OpenDev is dedicated to
running only free software. All the infrastructure services are free,
and it's automated so they can spin up a git repo or mailing list in
minutes, instead of a long tedious manual process. Some of the team who
runs OpenDev used to work for me, so I'm happy to make introductions if
any GNU projects want to explore this as a backup plan.
Another free infrastructure option is Oregon State University's Open
Source Lab. Again, they only do infrastructure, and wouldn't have any
involvement in project or technical governance. It's largely staffed by
student interns to the department, so not as experienced as the OpenDev
folks, and there have been some issues. But, still more reliable than
FSF's infrastructure.
https://osuosl.org/
There are some other general free software umbrella organizations that
have a little more of an infrastructure focus. Software in the Public
Interest (who host Debian and X.org) comes to mind. But, they are
primarily a fiscal umbrella rather than infrastructure, and would likely
have a more lengthy human review process. (With OpenDev, I have
literally reached out over IRC about a new project, and had a mailing
list up within an hour.)
Feel free to share this info with any GNU maintainers.
Oh, one more slightly more unusual option is a small free software
foundation that's been operating in the US since 2018, and just
established a new entity in Belgium: Nordix Association (nordix.org). It
doesn't actually host projects in the Conservancy sense, but it does
host mailing lists and git repos for projects. Fair warning, though, I
personally admin the mailing lists (all GNU Mailman), which is good in
the sense that I can set up new ones very quickly, but it does mean that
I don't have the capacity to do spam review for a large number of new
mailing lists, so they'd have to do that part themselves. Nordix doesn't
host its own git repos, so that would be GitLab. I wouldn't rate this as
their best option, but having a place they can move to quickly may end
up being important, depending on how things go.