Re: Moving sourceware to the Linux Foundation? No thanks.

[Ian Kelling <iank@fsf.org>]

"Frank Ch. Eigler via Overseers" <overseers@sourceware.org> writes:

> Hi -
>
>> I see two important points that ought to be discussed on this topic.
>
> Thanks for joining the discussion.
>
>> The first is succession planning.  Sourceware is essentially a community
>> project with a relatively small number of people keeping it going.  It
>> needs trusted and capable people to step it to continue to maintain it.
>> Where are those people going to come from?  We shouldn't simply hope
>> that it will keep carrying on as before.
>
> Fair, we need to attend to recruiting more helpers.  (It was with this
> in mind that some folks got root on sourceware in the last few years.)
> With some moderate funding, the small amount of IT effort this place
> requires could be filled out with talented part-timers.  OTOH, it's
> not an emergency, and the system is not complicated, running
> off-the-shelf basic RHEL8 for the core stuff (git, mail, mailing
> lists, http, ssh, authentication).

There is already a built in succession plan you all seem to be ignoring.
GNU already separately hosts most of same infrastructure that sourceware
does. If sourceware volunteers all stepped down tomorrow, GNU would be
ready to immediately step up and host servers, maintain services,
recruit new volunteers, and that effort would likely be lead by FSF
sysadmin staff like me. There are currently 3 tech team members,
https://www.fsf.org/about/staff-and-board there's been about that many
for a long time, like a decade now, and we aren't going anywhere . GNU
infrastructure is a large part of every FSF tech team member's job that
we do full time. If you want to make succession plans, we should be part
of that planning.

-- 
Ian Kelling | Senior Systems Administrator, Free Software Foundation
GPG Key: B125 F60B 7B28 7FF6 A2B7  DF8F 170A F0E2 9542 95DF
https://fsf.org | https://gnu.org