A well-known secret in the world of open source software is that many projects rely on donated hosting for everything from their websites to testing infrastructure. When the company providing said hosting can no longer do so for whatever reason, it leaves the project scrambling for a replacement. This is what just happened for Alpine Linux, as detailed on their blog.
Previously Equinix Metal provided the hosting, but as they are shutting down their bare-metal services, the project now has to find an alternative. As described in the blog post, this affects in particular storage services, continuous integration, and development servers.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, Equinix was also providing hosting for the Freedesktop.org project. In a post on their GitLab, [Benjamin Tissoires] thanks the company for supporting them as long as they have, and details the project’s current hosting needs.
As the home of X.org and Wayland (and many more), the value of Freedesktop.org to the average user requires no explanation. For its part, Alpine Linux is popular in virtualization, with Docker images very commonly using it as a base. This raises the uncomfortable question of why such popular open source projects have to depend on charity when so many companies use them, often commercially.
We hope that these projects can find a new home, and maybe raise enough money from their users to afford such hosting themselves. The issue of funding (F)OSS projects is something that regularly pops up, such as the question of whether FOSS bounties for features are helpful or harmful.
Alpine is not a project you host lightly, with a monthly transfer of about 800TB.
eg on EC2 US East region, that’s more than $40k per month in transfer fees.
What the…I thought Alpine just another Linux distro.
Seems like they are popular in the hosting space? Why Alpine versus TinyCore (17MB) or Ubuntu server (widely supported, I think)
In the meanwhile, can’t they just buy a used PC and host their project at one of devs home? Refurb Dell Precision with i9 9900K and 32G of RAM can be had for about $500. Should be more than enough to run nginx, git, python and make.
Maybe 15 years ago when CGNATs didn’t exist, and when you paid an ISP, you actually got an IPv4 address
If you don’t get your own IP then change ISP.
I use local cable operator and I get mostly static* public IP. In fact I can get multiple public IPs at the same time by plugging switch after ISP’s modem and connecting my routers to the switch.
* IP is calculated from MAC used to connect to cable modem ethernet port so as long as MAC doesn’t change it’s pretty much a static IP (or the other way, can be rapidly changed when needed).
I’m not sure you grasp the concept of scale.
“This raises the uncomfortable question of why such popular open source projects have to depend on charity when so many companies use them, often commercially.”
Best be careful what you ask for there. Inviting corporate funding into FOSS strongholds is rather like welcoming a Trojan horse into your city – for a repeat performance…
Yes, it would be more fair if companies gave more financial or hosting support to the FOSS projects which they benefit from. But corporations are, by their nature, parasitic empire builders. Relying on them to honour the Free (as in speech) and Open principles of FOSS is dangerous.
We need more or a more general foundation that can handle taking corporate donations and distributing them to projects without directly linking the source funds.
That way they can get paid but not have undo influence hanging over them.
Imagine if there was a package manager that used torrents…
Of course there would have to be some trusted signing going on…
It’s probably a solution in search of a problem today but with North America on the brink of returning to the stone age…
So all of the power for modern infrastructure lies in the hands of a few open source contributors? It seems like companies that rely on such would want to help, lest that little piece in the XKCD comic fails.
Could they go on strike until some rich CEO threw down sincE they hold the cards?