I am still not sure what prpl is for. Nor, what happens to donated funds, if any...
I have long wanted some non-profit org to serve as an intermediary between the profit centered corps and the developers. I don't think SPI or prpl is doing this right. Linaro sort of used to... There needs to be some sort of translation between the three parties of real needs. A corp is used to paying X for Y, in particular, not fuzzy donations... As sort of a test case for what I'm trying to explain, there are a few people that contribute towards keeping the Continuous Integration and build system of openwrt up and running, both in terms of hardware, and time. Many have been doing it longer than I have, but for most of the last 4 years a lot of the visible hardware came from me (snapon, huchra, gb-XX). For 14 months of that, courtesy of a google cloud grant that expired last year, I was running 6(?) boxes at a cost of about $1750/month, + 2 donated boxes from isc.org - and builds popped out in half a day for everything. I liked it.... I had to shut all but one machine off after that grant expired, and isc has (sadly) just shut down their free non-profit hosting service also... huchra is nearly gone, snapon has moved to sweden behind a fw where it can't act as a host... ... and recently I see that the lack of enough machines in the build system was annoying enough to at least one party to start up a new box... ... but - dang it! - the benefits of CI for openwrt should be *obvious to everyone that uses it*. Especially including some big corps for which the opex of a few thousand dollars a month isn't even noticeable. HP supports debian's build cluster, for example. Now, of late, I've had a devil of a time keeping the lights on. My contribution to the cluster costs me $220/month that I would rather spend on... food, and fixing wifi in general, etc [1] So... I'd like it if there was some org(s) were paying these costs (and for everyone else contributing a box themselves) rather than me. That is a "support of" sort of thing, where control remains in the hands of engineers that care. (In fact, I don't have to care, travis takes care of the problems, I just pay the opex bill) If some org were to "take over" this responsibility, the control slips to that org - gains management - and other BS - and the CI might not get done as well. If some org were to however, take a wishlist of existing costs from existing developers, turn that into a budget, present that to willing commercial orgs, and turn that around to the requesting dev (and publicly), then everyone's lives would be better. X for Y with the help of Z. Mine, and (I think) most of openwrt folk's resistance to "organizations" comes from the top down attempt at exerting control in exchange for money. ... Certainly the build system could get done better! I was very happy seeing benchmarks go by with how much faster they could be done... and doing that right does involve human resources that might want to get paid also... the main reason why gb-10 still exists is because it was weeks of time to get it running in the first place, and easy to replicate, and I'd hate to lose those invested weeks were more grant money to arrive... Now: I have no intention of shutting down gb-10, but I came within hours of having to do so, last month. Got saved by a shuttleworth flash grant... At the moment I am just sending the personal - not a single !@#! corporate - donations I get at the below url to keep it running, and not thinking about it very hard - but I just reached for some spare cash to buy a new board, and came up empty. it's the meta problem, of keeping infrastructure beneath the devs, in general, with a minimal amount of overstructure on top, that's bugging me today. thx for listening. ideas? Dave Täht Keeping the lights on for open routers [1] https://www.patreon.com/dtaht?ty=h _______________________________________________ openwrt-devel mailing list openwrt-devel@lists.openwrt.org https://lists.openwrt.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openwrt-devel