Hi Tom, On Mon, Jun 02, 2025 at 16:27, Tom Rini <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hey all, > > Something I've talked about in release emails earlier this year, and > promised a follow-up on but hadn't gotten to yet, was how to manage the > project moving forward. The email I made last week about Simon also I > believe highlighted some of the problems that we as a project and > community face. > > As a starting point, I want to thank all of the people (and companies) > that have been working on the project and doing the less visible but > important and expensive things that need doing. DENX has been running > much of the project infrastructure since inception. Currently, all of > the fast AMD64 build machines are from Simon. Linaro has been providing > two of the 3 fast ARM64 build machines (the other is from Simon). Our > patchwork project is on OzLabs group. A number of years ago, Simon > picked up the u-boot.org domain. There's likely other things I'm > unintentionally forgetting here. > > So, what are the problems I see and would like to get some help and > guidance in working on resolving? Well, in a lot of ways it all stems > from one root cause. The project was founded on the "BDFL" model, > which was quite common at the time, and a relatively reasonable option > too. > > But now? It makes getting resources harder. There are a number of people > working in the background now trying to get things donated to the > project (thank you, again) but I also know historically it's been a > challenge not having some distinct entity for U-Boot. Individual > contributions are best done as "I have a server" or similar. Conferences > are a strictly individual thing. > > Then there's the day to day parts of the project. I feel like I > shouldn't complain about taking vacations where I just handle pull > requests and not patchwork stuff too, or only doing a few things on the > weekend. But it also means there's no real way to handle contentious > issues other than what I say goes. Which isn't ideal. > > What to do about it? Well, I've talked with the Software Freedom > Conservancy (https://sfconservancy.org/) (SFC) earlier in the year (and > before that, years ago at conferences). There are number of open source > and community focused projects that they provide a legal entity for and > help with administrative things. I've personally been a fan of what they > do, and donated yearly for a long time. I think they would be a good fit > for the project because they do this kind of work for a number of other > big and important and community centric projects. I would encourage > anyone interested to look at their website and look around. > > But that is something like step two or step three. The first step is > that I'm hoping some members of the community would like to formalize > helping with the project. SFC can help us with creating some > organizational structure for the project itself, but we need a few > people to do it. And before we even get that far, help with the mailing > list moderation queue and triaging patchwork assignments would be great. I'm happy to help with the mailing list moderation queue. I'm in Europe timezone. I will be away for 2 months (August-Sept). Please reach out to me if you think I can help. > > Thanks for reading this, I look forward to finding a sustainable path > forward for the project and the community at large. > > -- > Tom
