proposing Sourceware as Software Freedom Conservancy member project

[Frank Ch. Eigler]

The overseers of the hosting server sourceware.org aka cygwin.org aka
gcc.gnu.org aka (others *) invite the community to assist us in
further securing the future of the service.  Red Hat has been and
continues to be a generous sponsor of the hardware, connectivity, and
the very modest employee time it requires.  We are glad to report
there are zero indications of any change to this commitment.  Things
are stable, new services are coming online, and users seem to be
happy.  However, it is always good to think about any future needs.

To protect confidence in the long term future of this hosting service,
we have reached out to the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) to
function as a "fiscal sponsor".  For those who aren't familiar with
it, the SFC is a registered US 501(c)(3) public-benefit charity,
associated with dozens of major FOSS projects, including Buildbot,
Inkscape, Git, Outreachy, QEMU and Xapian:
https://sfconservancy.org/projects/current/

SFC takes open applications from FOSS communities and projects. Our
application process has just begun.  As a part of this effort, we
contemplate no necessary technical change or disruption of any sort,
including to operations, governance, or hosted project procedures or
licensing.  It would be solely a way to help future needs by providing
routing for financial contributions, and have an official, charitable
entity (with a real legal existence) for supporting sourceware.org.
If accepted as a member project, sourceware.org would have access to
this list of services from SFC, and possibly more:
https://sfconservancy.org/projects/services/

This year, we set up a roadmap to improve the services for tracking
and automation of email based patches and testing
https://inbox.sourceware.org/overseers/YrLdfDWzq1T4k5xg@wildebeest.org/
This resulted in the launch of several new or updated services
(builder.sourceware.org, patchwork.sourceware.org and
inbox.sourceware.org).  This didn't need any additional funds (except
for the sourcehut mirror which costs $10 a month).  We are proud to
operate these services with minimal costs so we can sustain them both
in good and in bad years.  But that doesn't mean everything has to be
done on a zero budget.  Financial contributions are more than welcome
so that if the need arises we can contract for some unusual admin
stuff or additions to services like bugzilla, buildbot, patchwork,
public-inbox or sourcehut.

There are a few small-ticket items that we would dearly welcome
community assistance with.  This is just a draft of a draft, just to
give you an idea of the scope.  No gigaprojects, just community scale:
helping each other out.  That kind of low-budget efficiency seems to
be a perfect match for SFC.

- For helping future overseers come on board, we'd love someone's help
  to write refreshed SOP documentation about how things work and how
  to fix problems.

- We could use more documentation for projects to help them come on
  board, operate their share of the infrastructure, and easily leave
  if they like.

- We might need a new security review and more tooling to manage
  credentials and access.

- We could use help further automating the management of the new
  buildbot system, and would love ever more build workers.

- Some projects operate extra infrastructure services on sourceware
  that require occasional updates, which they would prefer to offload
  to someone else.

These are only some ideas.  We'd love yours.  We can start tracking
these on bugzilla, why not?
https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/describecomponents.cgi?product=sourceware

We would especially love to hear from people who are able to oversee
and/or carry out this kind of work.  If our application to the SFC
succeeds, we need likeminded folks to help officially judge funding
priorities.  We promise the SFC application & committee work would be
as low-stakes and informal as possible.  Bradley and Daniel from the
Conservancy have agreed to monitor this discussion and answer any
questions about what the SFC can and cannot do to help us if we become
an SFC member project.

Sourceware has been operating since 1998.  With your advice and help,
we can keep hosting projects and their developers, comfortably and
steadily, another few decades.  https://sourceware.org/mission.html

Chris Faylor <cgf@sourceware.org>
Frank Eigler <fche@sourceware.org>
Mark Wielaard <mark@klomp.org>


(others *): We are reaching out to the 20 most active projects on
Sourceware (binutils, bunsen, bzip2, cgen, cygwin, debugedit, dwz,
elfutils, gcc, gccrs, gdb, glibc, insight, kawa, libabigail, libffi,
newlib, sid, systemtap, valgrind) about this proposal to make sure
nobody is caught unaware. And Sourceware is also responsible for
preserving the history of another 40 projects which are either less
active, have been archived or moved on.