Re: [gentoo-project] Gentoo, GitHub, and the Social Contract

[Rich Freeman]

On Sun, Feb 15, 2015 at 6:24 PM, Patrick Lauer <patrick@g.o> wrote:
> On 02/16/15 01:42, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
>> On Sun, 15 Feb 2015 11:17:54 -0500
>> "Anthony G. Basile" <blueness@g.o> wrote:
>>> But the big difference here is that github is a company while infra
>>> is volunteer work.
>>
>> And the equipment and hosting is paid for by...
>>
>
> Volunteers.
>

Honestly, it is a lot more complex than that.  Infra could probably
provide a better overview, but I'm not sure how much time they want to
spend on giving one, so I'll muddle through as best I can from what
I've seen in my time as a Trustee.

Gentoo infra consists of many elements.  There is the hardware, the
maintenance of the hardware, the OS/software and the maintenance of
that, and the money to pay for all that stuff.

One of the largest areas of infra by volume are the mirrors.  These
are almost entirely hands-off on Gentoo's part as far as I'm aware.
They're mostly donated by organizations, and they're told how to set
them up, and they just run some Gentoo-provided scripts/etc to stay up
to date.  The money/labor to keep them running/bandwidth/etc is all
donated by the mirror hosts.  I'm sure that if something goes wrong
somebody from Gentoo infra helps them out, so there probably is a bit
of labor on their part.  Not really anything in the way of "equipment
and hosting" though.

Then you have the core infra.  This is stuff where infra spends the
bulk of its time.  As I understand it some of the hardware is
Gentoo-owned, and some of it is owned by sponsors who provide infra
access to it.  Almost all of this stuff has a sponsor providing
hosting/network/power/etc, and generally if a disk dies or whatever it
ends up being an employee of a sponsor or such who swaps stuff out for
us (perhaps with us sending them the hardware to swap with).
Sponsor-provided stuff tends to have the bulk of the costs paid by
sponsors.  Gentoo-owned stuff tends to have the money come from
Gentoo, which comes from our many donors (lots of individuals, and
Google Summer of Code is a big source of income I believe even after
expenses).  Recently Gentoo has been kicking in for some of the costs
at one of our sponsors, but they kick in a fair bit themselves.

So, quite a bit of labor comes from volunteers.  However, the "paid
for" bit largely comes down to our sponsors, augmented by numerous
small donations from within the community.

All that said, I honestly don't consider the risk of one of our
sponsors "censoring" us is all that likely unless Gentoo as a
community really got out of hand (such that being associated with us
were damaging to their reputations).  The more realistic risk with our
model is that individual sponsors can come and go - maybe a sponsor
gets bought out or goes out of business or just is having hard times
and can't afford to support us any longer.  This happens on occasion,
and obviously we try to be gracious about it since they ARE donors
(usually they work with us on migration too).  However, my sense is
that most/all of our infra is hand-built servers running on bare
metal, which means that moving services around involves a lot of
labor.  It isn't like copying a disk image to a new VM provider and
cutting over DNS, let alone something like puppet/chef/ansible.

As we build out new infra services (whether they be git, gitlab, or
whatever) it would be really nice if the server configs (minus
credentials) could be open.  That would make it far easier for others
to contribute to them, automate their deployment, and so on.  There
really shouldn't be any reason that somebody shouldn't be able to set
up their own gentoo.org with everything but the domain name.  Sure, we
won't get there overnight, but it is a direction that makes sense.  We
just don't have the manpower to be excluding potential contributions.

-- 
Rich