status of projects.openmoko.org

[Harald Welte]

Hi Marek,

On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 12:03:24PM +0800, Marek Lindner wrote:
 
> as discussed some weeks back Openmoko wants to reduce the time spent on other 
> things next to the phone. Part of that process is the shutdown of our 
> projects.openmoko.org server. In the past we spent considerable time and effort 
> maintaining it. As many people noticed things were not perfect and caused 
> trouble quite often. 

As the person who once upon a time initiated projects.openmoko.org, I have
mentioned this internally, everytime this debate was started:

1) I personally do not think the amount of time spent on administraton of a 
   gforge site is not all that much.  Also, even that could be done by
   volunteers - if you think the Openmoko sysadmins are too expensive for that.

2) The actual cost of hosting the server is negligible.  I know ho much it is,
   I would even personally pay for it to keep something like
   projects.openmoko.org alive.

> We know some people feel it is the right place to concentrate the code that 
> runs on the Openmoko platform. The decentral nature of the Internet & the FOSS 
> community has proven to work well because everybody is focussing on what they 
> think they can contribute. There are much better project platforms out there. 
> For Openmoko it does not make sense trying to compete with them.

This is what Wolfgang has been claiming for quite some time.  It is not about
compettition.  It is exactly the benefit that openmoko users/developers get:  A
one-stop place where you can find a number of projects releted to openmoko.
This is much more convenient than having to search for everything and not
finding what you actually are looking for.

If gforge is the right platform or not for hosting it: You can always change
that software, if that is your problem.

The other issue is one of 'reliability' and is one of the reasons why I
personally don't host any of my projects at sourceforge or the like.  Who
tells you that they will still provide this serviec tomorrow?  What if they
change to a paid-for model?  Also, some of those sites use advertisement (which
is extremely ugly).  Also, the big project hosting sites are creating
single-points-of-failure, and we've already seen a massive security breach at
sourceforge in the past.

There's always an advantage to operate your own infrastructure rather than
to rely on others.

So maybe the community could decide if they would want to run and maintain
projects.openmoko.org?  Would that be a working compromise?  Since Openmoko
is always about the community, why not let them decide?  I'm sure if there
are enough interested people, somebody would volunteer for the actual system
adminsitration...

... and for the hosting, as indicated, even I would personally fund that, if
Openmoko doesn't want to do that.

-- 
- Harald Welte <laforge at openmoko.org>          	        http://openmoko.org/
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