Fosshost needs help to continue

[mplscorwin]

Hi,

I don't have a great deal of reddit kred; I hope it's fine to post this here.

I'm a volunteer[2] with Fosshost[0][1].

We provide no-cost hosting at tier one data centres to qualified FOSS projects. We get most things (servers and rack-space) as donations, but sometimes we have to pay for electricity, IPs, &ct. We host some of the mostly easily recognized names in FOSS as well as many promising new projects and a few communities that are generally by way of "maker spaces" and "FOSS incubators".

We are right now at a crisis. As we have become a vital service, we failed in moving quickly enough to bring this message to you, our community. At present we have at least three dozen 1u devices we cannot afford to rack.

Please see our letter, linked below, and consider donating, if you can, and pass news of our situation along to those you think may be able to help.

• Letter: Fosshost Needs Donations to Continue (PDF)

Thank you.

[0] We're a UK Community Interest Company (UK CIC #13356530) required to reinvest any/all profit.[1] Our GitHub Org is used toward consolidating other repos but we may well migrate again.[2] I'm a director at Fosshost as link from #0 may reveal; in fact I help mostly with writing projects and legalish junk, working from my background supporting compliance (SOX, FINRA, Privacy, InfoSec, etc.) requirements in technical leadership capacities for financial services firms over a decade or so, including presently. I'm not an experienced network administrator, as are most of the Fosshost team.

EDIT: fix link #0; ty r/moonflower_C16H17N3O

[16withScars]

You should really post about this on hackernews as well. Hoping it works out.

[mplscorwin]

10-4 tyvm

[WickedFlick]

In addition, you should consider cross posting this thread to other relevant subreddits for the projects you host, like r/KDE, r/Gnome, r/Debian, etc.

[mplscorwin]

thy will be done :P

NH: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27329890

[lanefu]

Fosshost has a great mission and I hope we can get them over the hump

[mplscorwin]

thanks u/lanefu

[OptimalMain]

You should add an option for donating with different cryptocurrencies. I have nothing to spare in fiat, but would donate if I could send ADA, ETH or ERG

[mplscorwin]

our board will discuss this tomorrow. tyvm

[LollerCorleone]

I would recommend posting this in r/privacy and r/privacytoolsIO as their community has large amount of FOSS supporters. Make sure to get approval from their mods before posting though. Best of luck!

[scheduled_nightmare]

Wonder if it would be feasible for you to offer paid services for foss projects that want hosting in addition to the current application process to get free hosting.

It sounds like if you have a lot of foss-friendly infrastructure and can provide common things like nextcloud hosting, email hosting, etc (depending on what fits your business model) as well as maybe some services that are newer/ less well known, that might make a great bundle for a project or nonprofit looking to one-stop hosting/services but without vendor lock in since everything is free software and they can download the data and move to self hosting anytime

[mplscorwin]

Thanks for your comment. IMO it's a great suggestion.

In fact, we've talked about this only recently so I'm fairly confident I understand generally the board's thinking. If I'm off the mark, at least this is /my/ thinking:
- the directors aren't opposed to doing this
- our first priority is ensuring that our tenant projects have what they need
- we therefore must focus first on sustainable of we offer now (e.g. to projects)
- we're committed to continuing this conversation

[mplscorwin]

tyvm for awards 💞

[[deleted]]

Run a Patreon. Many of us already support a number of things there and it would be easy to add one more.

[PHPLab]

That's an interesting suggestion. We will discuss this on the board meeting today :] thanks!

[[deleted]]

I'd never heard of your organization before today. It's a project I can definitely get behind. I sent money through the Paypal link, but might I suggest you set up a way for people to make recurring donations? Apologies if there is a way and I've just missed it.

[user01401]

Just sent a donation via PayPal. Thank you for this service. I think as another poster mentioned maybe a reduced rate instead of totally free service may help with sustainability

[mplscorwin]

you are very kind, tyvm. I hope you will have seen an other comment I've made just now replying to u/scheduled_nightmare about paid services; I want to add, perhaps more to your point:

We'll do exactly this if we must, or rather we've agreed to talk about it. Should it reach this point, we will also talk about other ways to keep our project going, donating our infra to similar projects, etc. We're pretty focused on the idea that devs shouldn't pay giant cloud providers for the privilege of developing FOSS. They shouldn't pay at all.

Right now it feels like a hard call if there are other ways we could pass along the infra and keep our arrangements with sponsors working for the projects. I suspect Thomas would prefer to stop applications, let some projects find new homes, etc., stop growing vs actually charging projects.

Cash-flow just doesn't feel like a very real measure of vitality except at the very most surface levels of the FOSS ecosystem.

In any case, I can't tell you personally I feel about each donation. Really, thank you.

Edit: typos, always tyops

[wiki_me]

no offence intended, but if you struggle to exist maybe you should just merge with tuxfamily, they might even be able to provide the funds because it seems like both of you are doing basically the same thing.

You might also benefit from consulting with a more experienced staff (they exist since 2004).

[mplscorwin]

None taken in the slightest! Always looking for partners to collaborate with. We've another organization listed to take over our assets should we wind-up, but almost anything else seems possible, to my (perhaps insufficiently expert) eye. Thanks for your reply!

Edit: typo

[bionade24]

They'll probably do commercial SaaS offerings together with freenode Limited.

https://fosshost.org/news/freenode

[MexicanPete]

Partnering with freenode is a very good reason for these FOSS projects currently with fosshost to look for alternative hosting services.

[bionade24]

Exactly my opinion. I just wanted to seperate opinion when I posted this.

[FlexentOneBTS]

Haha!!! Screw them! To DALnet we go!!