Sourceware Survey results and Budget priority discussions

[Mark Wielaard]

On Thu, Apr 09, 2026 at 04:18:49PM +0200, Mark Wielaard wrote:
> The results of the Sourceware Survey 2026 are in!
> https://sourceware.org/survey-2026
> 
> And since tomorrow is the second Friday of the month it is also
> Sourceware Open Office time!
> 
> Come and lets discuss the Survey results and see what they mean for
> our Budget priorities this year.

For those that couldn't attend:

- Discussed upgrading forgejo and moving the forge to a bigger faster
  virtual machine (vm02) in the new datacenter this weekend. The new
  setup is like the forge-stage setup, so it will be easier to move to
  an Ansible setup and more admins can help out.

  [This has now been completed, please yell and scream if
  https://forge.sourceware.org is acting up after the transfer.]

- https://sourceware.org/survey-2026
  The survey ran from Friday, 20 March to Friday, 3 April. There were
  84 responses. Which amounts to ~20% of "active developers",
  depending how you define that (there are ~400 people with
  ssh/gitolite push access, if you ignore those that have been
  explicitly disabled because of non-activity). Of those that
  responded ~70% are active committers, ~60% has a bugzilla account,
  ~31% edit wikis, ~30% have editbugs rights, ~26% has a forge
  account, 20% has a patchwork account, ~12% are bugzilla admins and
  ~13% are admins/list moderators.

- There was various actionable feedback to help contributors feel
  engaged and maybe become more regular contributors. The most
  requested initiative (26%) was Forgejo process improvements. The
  least requested were hardware keys (11%). But it wasn't clear if
  people had fully read the plans descriptions at
  https://sourceware.org/sourceware-security-vision.html#plans
  One of the issues discussed was what a dedicated sysadmin could do
  for us. So we probably should expand the written out plans a bit and
  integrate the other feedback.

- Cygwin has some requirements no other project as because they want
  to produce Windows binaries. But we currently don't have a Windows
  buildbot builder to move off using Appveyor and GitHub (issue for
  some contributors). Also there is no CodeSign support. We will
  discuss options with OSUOSL and Conservancy.

- Good to see ~10% has donated to Sourceware
  https://sourceware.org/donate last year we estimated that to
  replace/renew hardware we would need ~3 years. It looks like we can
  fill out hardware fund in just ~1 year.

- Next up is updating our budget proposals with the new feedback and
  create a write up for our individual/corporate/grant organizations
  and donors to present with the new (financial) year overview (which
  starts May 15th).

- For the forge Claudio is working on the big patch set for "Send all
  PR discussion to mailing list"
  https://forge.sourceware.org/forge/batrachomyomachia/issues/15
  Done is the functionality that deals with the situations where
  people perform reviews, explicitly ask for review, send a command
  and send a single comment. Todo is when a pull request is closed and
  a summary must be sent and a manual "send everything to the mailing
  list" to deal with all the existing closed pull requests.