[gentoo-project] Infra Kickstarter?

["Robin H. Johnson" <robbat2@gentoo.org>]

On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 07:10:53AM -0500, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 4:01 AM, Robin H. Johnson <robbat2@gentoo.org> wrote:
> >
> > If I could afford to spend the more than just volunteer time on Infra,
> > yes, I'd love to have few full 40 hour weeks to put into cleaning up our
> > cfengine and puppet to where it's significantly easier to manage.
> 
> The one thing I was trying to avoid doing was giving an impression
> that the infra team isn't busy doing work that helps everybody around
> here.
> 
> You summarize the problem well here.  You're too busy due to a labor
> shortage to do the sorts of things that would help reduce the labor
> shortage.
Of infra staff, in 2014 antarus left infra, and we gained dastergon
prometheanfire redlizard. bonsaikitten turned us down again, as he's
busy running the gentooexperimental infrastructure.

> I don't mean to trivialize the problem, either.  Gentoo has a lot of
> donated infrastructure, and a decent amount of cash when you're
> talking about replacing hard drives and such.  The problem is that we
> really don't have the kind of money it would take to take on even a
> single employee.
I've wondered in the past, about doing a Kickstarter/IndieGogo to pay me
for spending a month or two on Gentoo, based on the model of the very
successful Django kickstarter:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andrewgodwin/schema-migrations-for-django
(there have been other open source kickstarters since then, but the
Django one was one of the first that delivered just open source
software).

If I wanted to do it full-time, for the cost of living (with my wife and
10 month old daughter) in Vancouver, at a bare minimum, I need it to be
at least $6000CAD/month before taxes.

Potential major projects for it, in a rough priority order:
- Get rid of cfengine
- Migration of services off some of our oldest servers
- Split-model Puppet (like Wikimedia)
- Projects Hosting (mostly repurposing 'kup', but needs some dev work)
- Split mail & dev.g.o
- eu.dev.g.o box (post-split of mail)
- Official Gentoo cloud images, from releng (because they'd make infra's
  life easier too).
- List Archives
- Website revamp

Stuff that is NOT on the table (and why)
- Git migration 
  - We're actually just blocked on a specific new sponsor for more than
	month now, they bought a nice new box, and they have to fix
	something in their network.

This also needs to have a self-sustaining result, not an expectation
that it will be repeated in future.

-- 
Robin Hugh Johnson
Gentoo Linux: Developer, Infrastructure Lead
E-Mail     : robbat2@gentoo.org
GnuPG FP   : 11ACBA4F 4778E3F6 E4EDF38E B27B944E 34884E85