[Board] Travis-CI & OSGeo

[Howard Butler]

> On Apr 23, 2018, at 9:50 AM, Regina Obe <lr at pcorp.us> wrote:
> 
> My issue is not that Even shouldn't be given the freedom to manage his project the way he wants.  Of course he should.

Yes it is. You're arguing that you can spend $5000 on something more worthy than supporting GDAL with the project infrastructure it wants to maintain under OSGeo's umbrella.

> The point is that 
>  
> 1)      He is limited because he is under the OSGEO Project infrastructure on Github.  If he were on his own project space, like PostGIS or QGIS (or Geos used to be), he wouldn't be limited by the 5 worker limit. I fail to see what benefit this Org is doing us when several of aour key projects aren't even on it (e.g. QGIS, GRASS, PostGIS) and even if they are what is the point, people should be lured to the osgeo website, not github.

This is a really good point. Why should projects that are to be on their own for infrastructure and support bother with putting anything under an OSGeo umbrella at all?

Or in a less snarky tone, OSGeo needs to decide if supporting projects with infrastructure is part of its mission. Member projects have no budgetary power to put resources into infrastructure capabilities that work for them of their choice, and there's a SAC beast that must be fed with money and take on new projects to continue to have relevance. Many projects actively avoid SAC and OSGeo resources because it is lesser quality infrastructure. It is lesser quality infrastructure because it is really damn hard to be all things to everybody. Add the fact that SAC is almost entirely unrecognized volunteer effort, and it is very difficult to succeed long term with any kind of staying power. 

GitHub, Travis, and AppVeyor are products. They cost money. They are specialized tools. They work really well. They have organizations behind them. They didn't exist in 2006 when OSGeo was formed, so we started down the path of building our own. If we started in 2018, I'm unconvinced we would have built our own.

> 3)      I think with $5000, that's almost the size of the osgeo budget for hardware.  I think of all the good we could do with $5000/yr and something that could help all projects not just things hosted on GitHub.

Infrastructure is *so* much more than a piece of hardware in a subsidized data center that graciously hosts us.
 
> Like building up our own CI infrastructure that would test more than just Ubuntu.

You can use Docker with Travis to test whatever flavor you want.
 
> And what about AppVeryor.  How much are you going to have to pay for that?  Is it under the same core limitations or will you have to shell out an additional $5000/yr for that?

Yes, I would hope so. Sandro is very vocal about his disdain for Windows, so I'm sure he will complain, but you've made good business supporting windows prisoners, so maybe you won't. 

Is OSGeo a software foundation that supports projects that make software, or is it an advocacy organization for users looking to get leverage off of free and open source software? The balance has been wildly tipped toward the latter the past 5 years... The board needs to clearly signal OSGeo's relationship to its member projects in this regard. I hope the board can ignore the flaming arrows Regina and I are shooting at each other in a battle that will never end and make a decision about OSGeo's relationship to its member projects and their infrastructure. If the relationship is "you must use SAC stuff", then the board needs to dump significantly more resources into burnishing that infrastructure to an outcome that might still be unsatisfactory. If the relationship is "use whatever you want and pay for it yourself", projects with the wherewithal to do so are going to do it outside of an organization that frankly isn't providing them with anything. If the relationship is "incubated projects get XXX dollars of infrastructure funding to spend on tools of its choosing", maybe this acts as both an incentive to incubate and a ring to reach for.

What we have now, where the answer is "volunteer your volunteers' time to build infrastructure within SAC" is not the solution.

Howard




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