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Home / News / Blog
Sourceware thanks Conservancy for their support and urges the community to support Conservancy
bySourceware PLC
on November 27, 2023
Sourceware is maintained by volunteers, but hardware, bandwidth and
servers are provided by sponsors. It is our goal to offer a worry-free, friendly
home for Free Software projects. Because Free Software needs Free Infrastructure.
We have only been a Conservancy member project for 6 months, but we
started the search for a fiscal sponsor about two years ago. Although
we probably didn't really know or understand why we needed one at first
or the services they provide.
Sourceware has been a Free Software hosting platform since 1998.
As a developer platform for developers getting consensus on technical
roadmaps
has always been easy. But the discussion on governance took some time.
In particular how much influence corporations should get was at times contentious.
Sourceware may be volunteer managed, but wouldn't be possible without the hardware,
network resources and services provided by some corporate sponsors. The Sourceware
community values their independence and the strong community which it manages.
After nine months of discussion we finally settled on joining the Software Freedom Conservancy
with a Project Leadership Committee of eight members
(Frank Ch. Eigler, Christopher Faylor, Ian Kelling, Ian Lance Taylor, Tom Tromey, Jon Turney,
Mark J. Wielaard and Elena Zannoni).
Our Fiscal Sponsorship Agreement
with the Conservancy states that there cannot be a majority of people affiliated
with the same organization (max two members can be employed by the same entity at once).
The agreement also states that for projects Sourceware hosts everything will be distributed
solely as Free Software and that we will publish all services as Free Software. There is also a
conflict of interest policy for the PLC.
Joining the Software Freedom Conservancy as a member project made
Sourceware more structured. We have monthly Open Office hours now to learn
from the community about any infrastructure issues and then the Sourceware
Project Leadership Committee meets to discuss these, set priorities
and decide how to spend any funds and/or negotiate with hardware and
service partners together with the Software Freedom Conservancy staff.
Projects hosted by Sourceware are part of the core toolchain for GNU/Linux distros, embedded systems,
the cloud and, through Cygwin, Windows. Years ago Ken Thompson laid out the roadmap for attacking an
operating system via the compiler and other code generation tools. These days these are known as supply chain attacks.
The Free Software community should reasonably insist that they be defended against these kinds of attacks with
mechanisms for prevention, detection and restoration. We have been encouraging hosted project to write up a security
policy which we support with technical infrastructure. Sourceware now offers different ways to attest a patch or email
is valid. Using the Sourceware public-inbox instance you can use b4 for patch attestation using dkim, gpg-signed emails or patatt.
Projects concerned with source code integrity now have various options to use signed git commits, signed git pushes,
or use gitsigur for protecting git repo integrity. And new services, like our snapshots server https://snapshots.sourceware.org/
are run in containers, on separate VMs or servers (thanks to our hardware partners). Sourceware also leverages Conservancy's
advisory role in how community projects are impacted by and can comply with recent regulations like the
USA Cyber Security Directives and the EU Cyber Resilience Act.
Conservancy staff has been attending conferences to discuss with the Sourceware
community, first virtual, then in person. Without having a formal fundraising program
we already collected more than $6000 in just 6 months for Sourceware. We got even
more support from hardware partners, who provided us with extra servers for our
buildbot and to setup new services. We wrote up a Roadmap
looking backwards to the last 25 years and looking forwards to the next 25 years.
All this resulted in more volunteers showing up helping out.
Having been part of Conservancy for just 6 months has given the
community and volunteers running the Sourceware infrastructure
confidence in the future. We hope the community will support
the Software Freedom Conservancy 2023 Fundraiser
and become a Conservancy Sustainer
so Conservancy can support more Software Freedom communities like
Sourceware.
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