State of Things

[Peter Lawler]

Hi Board,
Per Gary's reply to my regarding an IMF/Apple/Elon Musk joke I made in
Gary's Pidgin Meme Discord channel, I don't believe it's possible for
me to have a reasoned conversation with him and as such I shall
contribute to this by directing my thoughts to the board.

1. I suspect that as no reasonable IT person would confuse a container
tool with an IM tool, such a course of action would be fruitless (see
a number of MacDonald's cases where they've gone up against say home
hardware stores)
2. I'm largely careless about the choices, however I cannot recall if
I've mentioned major free university mirroring before (eg, AARNet) and
whether IMF has applied for such.
3. The possibility of moving to GNOME is an intriguing one. Based on
various comments from other board members over the past few years,
it'd seem that perhaps this may be some goal we're looking towards.
While I do not know whether other software nonprofits are looking to
pick the IMF up, I also do not know whether the IMF board has made any
explicit statement on such a topic. While I agree that Robot101 would
be a great person to help us out, I am conflicted as to the 'public
perception' (for want of a better term) of having IMF's projects
brought under GNOME's umbrella. While GIMP is named for GTK, and all
the accompanying stuff that goes along with it, on one hand I'm not
sure whether folks out there appreciate the distinction but on the
other hand I dunno if they care. While I understand and appreciate
that the whole IMF thing can and is considered by some to be a hassle
to our regular day to day lives, I suspect the underlying issue Gary
is dealing with here is that the wider Free Software Non-Profit
community is unaware of the situation. While I think chatting with
Robot101 would be great, I think it'd also behoove us as board members
to make an explicit statement on such a search as well as making
public other such stuff that will assist in removing this noose around
our neck in preference for others who are regularly paid to take care
of this kind of thing. There seems to be some issue regarding Adium,
however I am currently loathed to talk to that at any extent.
4. I remain beastly careless about the email situation. Whatever is
likely to work, and reduce Gary's time, stress, and cost overheads
works for me. He's done a fantabulous job in keeping things going this
far.

I shall now proceed to reply to any other emails in this thread I feel
I may be able to contribute to.


Regards,

Peter Lawler.

On Wed, 23 Nov 2022 at 11:19, Gary Kramlich <grim at reaperworld.com> wrote:
>
> 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>
>
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