what other floss foundations are supporting as services

Jo Walsh jo at frot.org
Fri Jun 23 09:08:57 EDT 2006


dear sac'cers,

I asked a short questionnaire on the list at http://flossfoundations.org/ 
a kind of "OMG we started a foundation" support group, about 
what online services people are supporting for their projects and 
the volunteer/paid support tradeoff.

I got a small pile of responses which in the spirit of a shared
curiosity, I am forwarding here (the list has closed archives though it
is quiet and anyone is I think welcome to join)

>>>

Jo Walsh wrote:
> - what are foundations offering (svn, trac, mail, wiki, etc)

The MoFo offers:

- CVS (Repository too large and crufty to convert to SVN, and people
  don't think the incremental gain is great enough; other systems are
  being looked at)
- Bugzilla
- Tinderbox for continuous builds
- Bonsai for looking at the CVS tree
- LXR
- Various MediaWiki installations (developer.mozilla.org,
  wiki.mozilla.org)
- Mailing lists using mailman
- Newsgroups, in partnership with Giganews

We don't offer email services except to Foundation/Corporation employees
and Mozilla staff.

> - what are projects/members actually finding useful

All of the above :-)

> - are there real legal advantages to having one centralised repository
>   for different projects' source code and timestamped mail archives

What legal situation are you trying to create? Are you trying to avoid
concern about contribution provenance?

> - is volunteer sysadmin and hosting 'enough', or does it make a lot of
>   difference if people are paid; how does that effect volunteer energy?

We have a number of paid sysadmins working for the Corporation; we
couldn't do without them.

> The reasons I am asking might provide context for commentary; when the
> Open Source Geospatial Foundation started back in February, We inherited
> a contract with CollabNet that MapGuide, one of the charter projects, 
> was already using and paying for. The other OSGeo projects are all 
> mature and have long maintained their own cvs/svn, lists, etc, and
> have been resistant to moving to a non-free platform.

Quite right too ;-P

Gerv

Here is the data from Eclipse

> I wonder if the Borg here has any commentary on "best 
> practise" for running hosted services for projects in their 
> flossfoundation;
> 
> - what are foundations offering (svn, trac, mail, wiki, etc)

CVS, bugzilla, wiki, mail, news

> - what are projects/members actually finding useful

Really, all of the above. Bugzilla and wiki are very heavily used. 

> - are there real legal advantages to having one centralised repository
>   for different projects' source code and timestamped mail archives

I responded to that one in a separate note. Legal stuff is not necessarily
the only advantage.

> - is volunteer sysadmin and hosting 'enough', or does it make a lot of
>   difference if people are paid; how does that effect 
> volunteer energy?

Eclipse does have full-time sysadmin staff, but I realize that's not an
option for everyone. It definitely does have a negative impact on volunteer
energy. 

> The reasons I am asking might provide context for commentary; 
> when the Open Source Geospatial Foundation started back in 
> February, We inherited a contract with CollabNet that 
> MapGuide, one of the charter projects, was already using and 
> paying for. The other OSGeo projects are all mature and have 
> long maintained their own cvs/svn, lists, etc, and have been 
> resistant to moving to a non-free platform. The OSGeo board 
> is keen to take online service maintenance "in-house" next year. 

In management-speak this is a "build versus buy" decision. There is lots of
literature on how to do these analyses. Obviously, community dynamics have a
role to play in the decision but doing a decent cost/benefit analysis of the
options wouldn't really be all that hard. And then you have some real data
to use as part of the decision process. If it turns out that you're going to
spend extra money to roll your own (or vice versa) it's nice to at least
know that when you're deciding, right?

Hope that helps.

Mike Milinkovich
Executive Director,
Eclipse Foundation

Hi,

Jo Walsh wrote:
> - what are foundations offering (svn, trac, mail, wiki, etc)

All that (s/svn/cvs for another couple of weeks, and s/trac/bugzilla). 
Plus SSH shell accounts, tinderbox environments, and hosted websites in 
the gnome.org domain. And of course uploads of tarballs, and bandwidth 
for downloads. And an IRC network, irc.gimp.org or irc.gnome.org

> - what are projects/members actually finding useful

Bugzilla, source control, mailing lists, irc, wiki - for different 
projects, different things are more or less important. It goes without 
saying that regular web servers and databases are also provided by the 
foundation.

> - are there real legal advantages to having one centralised repository
>   for different projects' source code and timestamped mail archives

Not really. Copyright assignment would give a legal advantage in the 
case of a court case, but having copyright spread around is a good 
protection against a licence change (and also a pain in the ass if a 
licence change is desired).

> - is volunteer sysadmin and hosting 'enough', or does it make a lot of
>   difference if people are paid; how does that effect volunteer energy?

Tough question - no comment. Our sysadmins are all voluntary, and have 
been great, but we've had a few things slip through the cracks for a efw 
months, and a paid guy would have been nice then.

> The reasons I am asking might provide context for commentary; when the
> Open Source Geospatial Foundation started back in February, We inherited
> a contract with CollabNet that MapGuide, one of the charter projects, 
> was already using and paying for. The other OSGeo projects are all 
> mature and have long maintained their own cvs/svn, lists, etc, and
> have been resistant to moving to a non-free platform. The OSGeo board
> is keen to take online service maintenance "in-house" next year.

I agree with the other OSGeo projects :)


Good luck with your migration.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
bolsh at gimp.org
Lyon, France
Jo,

> I wonder if the Borg here has any commentary on "best practise" for
> running hosted services for projects in their flossfoundation;
>
> - what are foundations offering (svn, trac, mail, wiki, etc)

PostgreSQL is using Gforge and Trac in different places.   My fantasy is  a 
merger of the feature sets of the two tools.

> - what are projects/members actually finding useful

Mailing lists (more than anything), CVS/SVN, wikis, hosted homepages, file 
release system, doc sharing, news.   Less useful: issue tracking, forums, 
surveys.

> - are there real legal advantages to having one centralised repository
>   for different projects' source code and timestamped mail archives

No, but there are considerable new-user orientation advantages to having 
one place to look.

The only legal advantage would be if you were trying to enforce contributor 
agreements, in which case it would be a requirement.

> - is volunteer sysadmin and hosting 'enough', or does it make a lot of
>   difference if people are paid; how does that effect volunteer energy?

Well, volunteers haven't been enough for us, so far ... our big "projects 
merger" is now a year behind.   That being said, the budget for paid staff 
is likely far too high for most OSS-NPOs.

> My take on this is that there are a couple of core services for
> projects- code repository and mailing lists - which it may make a lot of
> sense (for legal reasons) for a foundation to manage in one place, and
> pay someone a retainer to support very high availability of. Then the
> foundation needs to run some services for itself, as much as for its
> projects - wiki, CMS for PR and tutorial documentation, homepages in
> different languages for local user groups. If nesc, We'll sponsor some
> open source development to get this together, and groupwise there's
> quite a lot of experience with Plone and connections to plone
> developers, which could lead into some neat member/group mapping
> features using http://plone.org/products/primagis , etc etc. This is all
> some way off, but perhaps other foundations would be interested in
> sharing the love?

Well, it seems counter-productive to try to build this on Plone when you 
could focus on improving Gforge or Trac instead.

-- 
--Josh

Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL @ Sun
San Francisco




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