State of Things

[Gary Kramlich]

Greetings All,

This email isn't exactly a happy one, but please bear with me...

First of all, I woke up today to see that AWS has created a new
container tool named Finch[1]. I reached out on their issue
tracker[2], and they basically said "they don't care". I reached out
to SFC via Twitter[3] but will be reaching out to them via email
shortly. I also reached out to Cory Doctorow to see if he has any
thoughts as we have a working relationship.

Second, you all may or may not be aware of the crap going over on
Twitter, but Logan Abbot, the current President of SourceForge and
some other stuff, seems to be in full support of it[4]. This is
basically the last straw for me, I've defended the new management in
the past, but it's just time to move on. Fastly has Open Source
plans[4] and I've reached out to them to apply for one. Assuming it's
granted, I'm planning on copying all releases to fastly and putting
new releases there as well, but we'll leave the existing files on
SourceForge due to history and the inability to redirect (I believe).

Next up.. Email... So you may have noticed, absolutely nothing has
happened with the email. The reason for that is that I came to you all
with a plan, and I never really got signoff either way. In fact, I
even got doubts and suggestions to look at other services that have
only been recommended to people. This definitely rubbed me the wrong
way. I've been busting my butt to keep this project and foundation
relevant, and it seems like that's not enough or people don't realize
how time consuming all of this is. And to top it off, literally no one
even acknowledged my question of "Would IMF be willing to pay me for
this work?". I want to get this email problem off my plate, but if I'm
going to be second guessed and expected to investigate every option
people have heard of without getting paid then I'm literally just not
going to do it as I have much more impactful things to work on.

Finally, I talked to Robert McQueen (aka robot101) a former Gaim
contributor and current president of the GNOME foundation. I
originally set up that call to determine if there was any funding or
support the GNOME foundation could offer us, but basically that would
just be GNOME Circle[6] now which I need to investigate yet.

But the discussion eventually turned to  possibly moving Pidgin under
the GNOME umbrella. The foundation has a precedent for this already as
they basically just handle money and stuff for GIMP. We have discussed
folding the corporation before and it may be a bit late to start that
process this year, but this is a viable option. That said, we didn't
talk about the Adium stuff at all, but I don't think handling domain
registration would necessarily be a problem either.

And in non-gloomy news, we finally created a Mastodon account for
pidgin  on fosstodon.org[7].

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/introducing-finch-an-open-source-client-for-container-development/
[2] https://github.com/runfinch/finch/issues/26
[3] https://twitter.com/rw_grim/status/1595169710160678921
[4] https://twitter.com/loganabbott
[5] https://www.fastly.com/fast-forward
[6] https://circle.gnome.org/
[7] @pidgin at fosstodon.org

Thanks,

--
Gary Kramlich <grim at reaperworld.com>