Re: Turning GNU into a bottom-up organization

[Mark Wielaard]

On Tue, 2019-10-22 at 14:54 -0400, DJ Delorie wrote:
> Well, that covers quite a bit.  Not all of it, I assume.  That might
> be enough for projects that live 100% in the gnu.org domain, but not all
> do.  The ones that do, just need to check that they really are, and the
> ones that don't, need a plan.
> 
> But I still say that every project should ask themselves the question -
> are they covered?  Do they need to do anything to protect their project
> from disaster?
> 
> Knowing - even if it's the simple "we're 100% on gnu.org" - is better
> than sticking your head in the sand and finding out too late that you're
> wrong.

You bring up a good point about infrastructure that a GNU project uses
for development/community purposes. Most projects that grow a bit
larger seem to migrate some or all of their infrastructure to project
specific (sub)domains and servers/services. Sometimes these domains and
servers/services are owned or managed by the FSF or the GNU maintianer
personally, sometimes by some other foundation or are simply donated
resources managed by some company.

For my own GNU project (some years ago) we did use savannah, but we
had to give up on lists.gnu.org because it just didn't scale to the
volume of email that we produced. Savannah didn't provide a wiki, so we
set one up ourselves, etc. We had setup our own planet. Organized
hacker meetings. But had to use SPI for helping with the finances
because the FSF couldn't help us at the time (these days there is the
FSF working together funds BTW, which are great!). I know other GNU
projects faced the same issues. Most GNU projects I am working on these
days are not even using savannah, but sourceware.

I am not sure what the best way forward is for these things. Can the
FSF scale to manage all these resources on behave of the GNU
maintainers and projects? The GNU volunteers that manage these
resources mostly don't work for the FSF and might not have the time to
scale them from project specific resource to "all of GNU" resource.

Cheers,

Mark