Re: [gentoo-project] Gentoo, GitHub, and the Social Contract

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Sun, Feb 15, 2015 at 12:43 PM, Alexey Lapitsky <lex.public@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 1. Volunteer work.
> Anthony, I'm glad that you brought up volunteer work.
> I'm pretty sure Gentoo Infra team is extremely busy with all kinds of
> problems. The volunteers' time is arguably the most valuable resource
> Gentoo has.
> In my opinion we should do everything possible in order to save
> volunteers' time, especially when it comes to baseline work (such as
> maintaining and upgrading the infra services).
>
> From this perspective, It would be unreasonable to ask Gentoo Infra
> team to support an open-source solution because GitHub might change
> policy.
> GitHub policy change would only affect Gentoo short term. GitHub usage
> will bring a lot of value and will save volunteers' time long-term.

In my experience you actually have to approach volunteer work in the
opposite way.

Ask whatever you want, just don't expect it to happen unless you're
the volunteer.

There is nothing wrong with pointing out that using a proprietary
solution like Github is problematic, and calling for somebody to
deploy something free instead.

It is even better if you go ahead and step up and deploy something
free yourself.  You don't need anybody's permission to set up Gitlab
for Gentoo.  Heck, I'm betting the Council/Trustees would even be
willing to let you have a gentoo.org subdomain for it.

Volunteers are often motivated by perceived benefit of their work.  If
they feel like the thing they're working on is really worthwhile and
sought after, they're probably more likely to put in time working on
it.  However, that isn't a guarantee - something vital to Gentoo could
easily go years without any volunteer contributions at all.

I do think it would be beneficial to make our infra more portable for
this reason.  I think having official Gentoo infra makes a lot of
sense, but ideally it should be possible for anybody with a stack of
VMs/containers to be able to spin up their own Gentoo infra such that
if they just pointed their DNS server at it, then all the Gentoo tools
work just fine.  That will make it easier for everybody to contribute
to infra, and make everything that much more portable when inevitably
one of our sponsors has to drop us (we have incredibly generous
sponsors, but not every arrangement can last forever).

-- 
Rich