Sourceware looking backward, looking forward, Fri 8, 15:00 UTC

Sourceware looking backward, looking forward, Fri 8, 15:00 UTC

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi all,

Lets discuss the previous year and the goals and budget for the
upcoming year. The Sourceware (financial) year runs from/to May 15
which is when we joined the Software Freedom Conservancy as a member
project. https://sfconservancy.org/news/2023/may/15/sourceware-joins-sfc/

Tomorrow is the second Friday of the month, so it is time for the
Sourceware Open Office again. This time one hour earlier so it isn't
yet weekend for those in Europe.

Friday May 8, from 15:00 UTC to 16:00 UTC
At #overseers on irc.libera.chat

$ date -d "Fri May 8 15:00 UTC 2026"

Last year was all about refreshing and expanding our hardware and
servers, moving into bigger datacenters and run all our services in
VMs instead of on bare metal servers.
https://sourceware.org/sourceware-wiki/servers-and-services-2026/

We spend a good chunk of our budget on bigger/faster hardware. But
also raised twice as much (individual) donations as the year before.

This looks pretty good and puts us "ahead of schedule". We predicted we
needed 3 years to raise enough money to refresh our hardware again. But
seem to have done it in one.

So for next year we can probably be a little more ambitious and also
request some more corporate funding and approach some grant makers to
accellerate some of the plans we discussed. There are a couple of
plans that could go a lot faster if we could hire some consultant or a
sysadmin that could execute them.

See also our previous Sourceware Survey results and Budget priority
discussions:
https://inbox.sourceware.org/20260412192052.GA15385@gnu.wildebeest.org

Sourceware relies on cooperation among a broad diversity of core
toolchain and developer tool projects, hackers, organizations,
ideas, and communication styles. The monthly Sourceware Open Office
meetings are one way of coming together as a community and discuss
our shared development infrastructure. For other ways to participate
see https://sourceware.org/mission.html#organization

Keep Sourceware worry-free, friendly and independent by donating
https://sourceware.org/donate.html support our fiscal sponser SFC
https://sfconservancy.org/sustainer and/or support OSUOSL for
hosting Free Software projects https://osuosl.org/donate/

Do you or your company want to sponsor Sourceware plans financially
https://sourceware.org/sourceware-security-vision.html#plans
donate hardware or services then contact us at sponsor@sourceware.org

Re: Sourceware looking backward, looking forward, Fri 8, 15:00 UTC

[Mark Wielaard]

On Thu, May 07, 2026 at 05:18:14PM +0200, Mark Wielaard wrote:
> Lets discuss the previous year and the goals and budget for the
> upcoming year. The Sourceware (financial) year runs from/to May 15
> which is when we joined the Software Freedom Conservancy as a member
> project. https://sfconservancy.org/news/2023/may/15/sourceware-joins-sfc/

For those that couldn't attend. A summary of what was discussed.

Thanks to SFC staff for attending and guidance on these budget talks
and for providing a stable financial administrative base.

Discussion has two goals.

- Prepare for yearly report, what did we predict we would spend/raise
and what did we actually spend/raise?

- And what do we believe the community wants the Sourceware PLC to
focus on next year and does that involve spending and raising more
money?

First is kind of easy, we look at the yearly report from last year.
https://inbox.sourceware.org/20250527023158.GA11631@gnu.wildebeest.org

"Leaving us with $10,095.15 at the end of the year"

"The PLC wants to use some of our current budget to add a bigger
machine... and help with our goal to isolate more services on separate
machines or VMs."

Doesn't say how much, but we hoped to not spend all of it, keep ~half
for emergencies and try to raise enough money in ~3 years to do
another hardware refresh.

How did we do? Not badly!  We finished the year with
$10,017.59. Spending $6,358.98 and raising $6,332.12.

server1 cost us $6,195.31 (including tax and shipping). That purchase
was really excellently timed. The 1.5TB ram would now cost as much as
the whole server.

Other expenses were paypal/banking fees and domain fees.

And with only individual donations. Last year the donations were ~$250
a month, this year they doubled to ~$500 a month.

We currently don't attach a dollar amount to the "in kind" donations
of hosting and hands on admin help from Red Hat and OSUOSL. Red Hat
used to host 2, now 3 machines (and for small hardware fixes they
sometimes just provide the parts). And OSUOSL used to host two small
1u servers for us, now a much bigger 2u machine. We are also using
some "cloud" servers from both of them.

OSUOSL said they like us to pay something for the colocation plus
bandwith, but aren't insisting. Given the current improved financial
situation, the recommendation to the PLC is to talk to the OSL to see
what is fair.

With their help our services all moved into VMs. Our hardware,
servers, VM setup looks pretty nicely now:
https://sourceware.org/sourceware-wiki/servers-and-services-2026
This should definitely get us going for the next 2 to 3 years.

So for next year we can focus more on services and helping the admins
out instead of spending on actual infrastructure/hosting/hardware. We
could try to be a little more ambitious and diversify our corporate
funding and approach some grant makers, so we rely less heavily on
individual donations.

Which brings us to the tricky question, what does the community want
us to focus on and how much money can we dedicate to that (if we don't
just want to depend on volunteer admins)?

See the survey and our previous discussions:
https://inbox.sourceware.org/20260412192052.GA15385@gnu.wildebeest.org

The majority of people didn't vote or said everything was fine. But
there is a clear "winner". Forgejo process improvements. We should
make a list of upstream bug/issues that are blocking us. For example
"restricted accounts" aren't really working out for us. And
user/account administration/rights should be more flexible so it
doesn't require full admin rights. It also would be nice to have very
light weight accounts that can just do agit. Recommend the PLC set
aside some money to get such upstream issues fixed to help forge
admins. And ask Claudio and Richard for guidance.

There are several plans that would go faster if we could hire some
consultant or a sysadmin that could execute them.
https://sourceware.org/sourceware-security-vision.html#plans

Specifically moving specific services into VMs, upgrading their
versions, and automating their administration/updates using (e.g.)
Ansible would be useful. This could be split up for specific
services. Specifically for bugzilla, buildbot, patchwork and
public-inbox. Recommend the PLC look into hiring consultants to
accellerate this work, if enough additional funding can be found.

Next up, finalizing the Sourceware year report and the budget writeup
for the funding drive.