Re: [gentoo-project] call for agenda items -- council meeting 2021-05-09

[Rich Freeman]

On Mon, May 3, 2021 at 11:48 AM Andreas K. Huettel <dilfridge@g.o> wrote:
>
> Am Montag, 3. Mai 2021, 17:31:03 CEST schrieb Thomas Deutschmann:
> > On 2021-05-03 17:04, Andreas K. Huettel wrote:
> > > Please don't go the "we are not responsible for anything" route,
> > > that's the fastest way to obstruct any productivity.
> >
> > Well, I don't know what we will discuss and what will be the
> > outcome. But imagine we would all agree and send a request to
> > foundation to stop spending AWS credits for X immediately.
> >
> > Foundation has to reject this request by law because such a request
> > must come from a natural person.
>
> Seriously, if the council would send a polite and friendly request to
> the foundation, and the trustees would outright refuse it only for
> that formal reason, I would consider that hostile and unconstructive
> behavior. Law doesn't come in because the trustees themselves can
> introduce motions.

Aside from that, there is no legal requirement that somebody outside
the Trustees put in a request for anything before the Trustees can
act, natural persons or otherwise.  With the exception of some of the
provisions in the bylaws for actions by members without the Trustees I
don't think the Trustees are even legally required to respond to any
request they receive.  Legally the Trustees more-or-less exist in a
vacuum, and if they want to solicit outside input for how things are
run that is up to them.

Of course in practice the expectation is that they're responsive to
the needs of the Gentoo developer community.  Legally though the
Foundation can do whatever it wants, which of course is part of why we
tend to run into these sorts of discussions.

I do agree with the sentiment that it is better to use AWS credits
than just let them expire, but it probably also makes sense to
evaluate how things are going, and consider if we could tweak things
so that we don't have an uber-tinderbox that burns through $25k in six
months, and then no AWS services or tinderboxing for six months at all
because, wow, that went fast.  I mean, maybe it wouldn't hurt to
figure out how we managed to burn through $14k in CPU in a few months.
Maybe it didn't cost us anything out-of-pocket but at that rate it
means those services can't be sustained yearlong, and obviously it is
costing Amazon something - I'm not sure they REALLY want us to burn as
much of their cash as we can manage in the last time possible.  If
nothing else I can only imagine the CO2 emissions...

-- 
Rich