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Drew needs to quit spending Sourcehut's money on whatever he wants. Back in October, he also hired "Sourcehut's first developer", but he gets paid to work on D

Drew needs to quit spending Sourcehut's money on whatever he wants. Back in October, he also hired "Sourcehut's first developer", but he gets paid to work on Drew's personal or favored projects (like Sway), not anything directly related to Sourcehut: https://sourcehut.org/blog/2019-10-15-whats-cooking-october-2019/ https://sourcehut.org/blog/2019-10-15-whats-cooking-october-... Sourcehut is in an alpha state, and is barely functional in a lot of ways. People are paying for it anyway because they support the site's vision and what it could be, and want Drew and the site to have the resources they need to continue working on it, so that it can eventually become something that's actually worth paying for. Those people are paying for Sourcehut with the expectation that the money will be reinvested into Sourcehut and used to maintain and improve it. None of them are doing it because they want Drew to buy random people microphones so they can make videos for Peertube. For someone that writes so vehemently about topics like tech and business ethics, it's extremely hypocritical for him to keep using Sourcehut's money as his personal slush fund. Maybe someday if Sourcehut is incredibly successful and they can't even figure out how to spend all their money this will be a reasonable thing to do, but right now it still needs these resources that are inexplicably being redirected to other projects instead.

ddevault 6y ago
The mission has always been "to improve the free and open source ecosystem", not just "to make a cool code forge". On many occasions (e.g. [0][1]) I have made it clear that the goal is to invest our profits back into the broader open source ecosystem. [0]: https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss/%3C20190426160729.GC1351%40homura.localdomain%3E https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss/%3C2019042616072... [1]: https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss/%3CBVRVZEWYB30Q.3HGIC803LDBH7%40homura%3E https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss/%3CBVRVZEWYB30Q.... I would rather not be the kind of company which pockets millions for its founders and investors with money built on the backs of the FOSS community. An explicit, stated goal is to spread the wealth and raise up the ecosystem as a whole. If you don't believe in that, then don't pay for it, it's your money. SourceHut-the-software-forge is not going to be any worse off because we spend $5K giving PeerTube a leg up. We spend more on that for a single build host for builds.sr.ht.
- carapace 6y ago
  Just FYI, I'm a paying customer of sr.ht and I'm glad to support what you do. You're awesome and I think this bootstrap fund is a great use of resources. Good job!
  - ddevault 6y ago
    Thanks <3
- Proven 6y ago
  > I would rather not be the kind of company which pockets millions for its founders and investors with money built on the backs of the FOSS community. It is called FOSS because the community doesn't mind what people do with the software. If you contribute with the expectation that users be obliged to do something in return, you (just like RMS) don't get it.
imglorp 6y ago
First of all, bravo to Drew for trying to nudge the world in a positive direction. I was just wondering if he was running a fund that did exactly this, to pay for a few open content creators and OSS developers. (Is there already a fund like he's sort of doing here?) If he (or someone) did peel off these altruistic activities, they could (a) get donations from others of like mind, (b) continue to let Drew use his good sense to decide how to spread those funds out to the creators, and (c) keep Source Hut funds separate so its users got a more fair deal. Even if he does keep them commingled, wouldn't mind paying for SH and having some of it go towards helping the community.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  Yeah, I paid for SH and I'm happy to see that money going to the broader ecosystem, but I could see having a parent "advancement of FOSS" organization that then also contributed to sourcehut in addition to others. I could see an argument for sr.ht being the central entity, but it feels like an unnecessary commingling of concerns. By analogy, it feels like shipping a sha256 function in libc: It makes some sense, but I'd rather see it factored out into a crypto library.
- ddevault 6y ago
  I think this would be a good idea in the long term, and I'd like to set something like this up. Ambitions like making sure driver maintainers have access to the hardware they need, paying for security audits, and so on, would be great. The biggest resource that is scarce is time, though - so for the time being this is the easier approach.
- kick 6y ago
  Its users are getting a fair deal, though. They're getting the service they paid for, with significantly less downtime than GitHub, and Drew is being fully transparent about how funds are spent.
kick 6y ago
Sourcehut [is] barely functional in a lot of ways. Since when? It has the best CI, has the best interface, has both Hg and git support, and does pretty much everything a forge is supposed to do. It also does discovery better than any other platform. I disagree with the rest of your comment, but the rest is wrong enough and obviously in bad faith enough that a response would be unnecessary.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  Yeah, just reads like someone disgruntled at how SourceHut spent the $5 they gave them. Reminds me of the kind of comments I unlocked when I took donations for my forum and someone who gave me $10 once, a year ago, would write paragraphs about how I'm misallocating their money.
- majewsky 6y ago
  > It also does discovery better than any other platform. So I went to https://git.sr.ht/ https://git.sr.ht/ which shows me nothing but buttons for login and register. Same for https://sr.ht/ https://sr.ht/. I'm really confused if I'm holding something wrong, but this doesn't look like discoverability at all. Is it better if I create an account?
  - kick 6y ago
    Yes, the site makes much more sense if you create an account (without an account you can still contribute to projects, though!), but you don't have to if you just want to browse projects: https://sr.ht/projects https://sr.ht/projects This is the easiest possible interface for discovery of projects, which is (in my opinion) something that GitLab and GitHub are pretty dreadful at. I'd go as far as to say there hasn't been a forge good at it since two SourceForge redesigns ago.
    - majewsky 6y ago
      Oh that's awesome. How on earth is this not the main page?
hombre_fatal 6y ago
Trying to sell your opinion as the opinion of a group of people is a really weak and see-through rhetorical device. Are your roleplaying as a spokesman?

ddevault 6y ago

The mission has always been "to improve the free and open source ecosystem", not just "to make a cool code forge". On many occasions (e.g. [0][1]) I have made it clear that the goal is to invest our profits back into the broader open source ecosystem. [0]: https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss/%3C20190426160729.GC1351%40homura.localdomain%3E https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss/%3C2019042616072... [1]: https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss/%3CBVRVZEWYB30Q.3HGIC803LDBH7%40homura%3E https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss/%3CBVRVZEWYB30Q.... I would rather not be the kind of company which pockets millions for its founders and investors with money built on the backs of the FOSS community. An explicit, stated goal is to spread the wealth and raise up the ecosystem as a whole. If you don't believe in that, then don't pay for it, it's your money. SourceHut-the-software-forge is not going to be any worse off because we spend $5K giving PeerTube a leg up. We spend more on that for a single build host for builds.sr.ht.

carapace 6y ago
Just FYI, I'm a paying customer of sr.ht and I'm glad to support what you do. You're awesome and I think this bootstrap fund is a great use of resources. Good job!
- ddevault 6y ago
  Thanks <3
Proven 6y ago
> I would rather not be the kind of company which pockets millions for its founders and investors with money built on the backs of the FOSS community. It is called FOSS because the community doesn't mind what people do with the software. If you contribute with the expectation that users be obliged to do something in return, you (just like RMS) don't get it.

imglorp 6y ago

First of all, bravo to Drew for trying to nudge the world in a positive direction. I was just wondering if he was running a fund that did exactly this, to pay for a few open content creators and OSS developers. (Is there already a fund like he's sort of doing here?) If he (or someone) did peel off these altruistic activities, they could (a) get donations from others of like mind, (b) continue to let Drew use his good sense to decide how to spread those funds out to the creators, and (c) keep Source Hut funds separate so its users got a more fair deal. Even if he does keep them commingled, wouldn't mind paying for SH and having some of it go towards helping the community.

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
Yeah, I paid for SH and I'm happy to see that money going to the broader ecosystem, but I could see having a parent "advancement of FOSS" organization that then also contributed to sourcehut in addition to others. I could see an argument for sr.ht being the central entity, but it feels like an unnecessary commingling of concerns. By analogy, it feels like shipping a sha256 function in libc: It makes some sense, but I'd rather see it factored out into a crypto library.
ddevault 6y ago
I think this would be a good idea in the long term, and I'd like to set something like this up. Ambitions like making sure driver maintainers have access to the hardware they need, paying for security audits, and so on, would be great. The biggest resource that is scarce is time, though - so for the time being this is the easier approach.
kick 6y ago
Its users are getting a fair deal, though. They're getting the service they paid for, with significantly less downtime than GitHub, and Drew is being fully transparent about how funds are spent.

kick 6y ago

Sourcehut [is] barely functional in a lot of ways. Since when? It has the best CI, has the best interface, has both Hg and git support, and does pretty much everything a forge is supposed to do. It also does discovery better than any other platform. I disagree with the rest of your comment, but the rest is wrong enough and obviously in bad faith enough that a response would be unnecessary.

hombre_fatal 6y ago
Yeah, just reads like someone disgruntled at how SourceHut spent the $5 they gave them. Reminds me of the kind of comments I unlocked when I took donations for my forum and someone who gave me $10 once, a year ago, would write paragraphs about how I'm misallocating their money.
majewsky 6y ago
> It also does discovery better than any other platform. So I went to https://git.sr.ht/ https://git.sr.ht/ which shows me nothing but buttons for login and register. Same for https://sr.ht/ https://sr.ht/. I'm really confused if I'm holding something wrong, but this doesn't look like discoverability at all. Is it better if I create an account?
- kick 6y ago
  Yes, the site makes much more sense if you create an account (without an account you can still contribute to projects, though!), but you don't have to if you just want to browse projects: https://sr.ht/projects https://sr.ht/projects This is the easiest possible interface for discovery of projects, which is (in my opinion) something that GitLab and GitHub are pretty dreadful at. I'd go as far as to say there hasn't been a forge good at it since two SourceForge redesigns ago.
  - majewsky 6y ago
    Oh that's awesome. How on earth is this not the main page?

hombre_fatal 6y ago

Trying to sell your opinion as the opinion of a group of people is a really weak and see-through rhetorical device. Are your roleplaying as a spokesman?