11 ms·

Fosshost Is Shutting Down

177 points by SamWhited 4y ago

kane231 4y ago
XCSme 4y ago
I never heard of Fosshost, but based on the name it was supposed to provide free hosting for open-source projects. What was the plan to sustain it?
- alyxw 4y ago
  Pray for the goodwill of DCs and donations, mostly. Ampere had provided a very generous amount of hardware. Actually putting that hardware into places was a lot of finding DCs willing to support the project.
- sacnoradhq 4y ago
  Wishful thinking perhaps. This is the problem of inherently unsustainable, poorly-governed, amateur operations: they're houses of cards waiting to fall apart. If someone wants hosting, then pay for real VPS or colo. Electricity, rack space, and cooling are usually the limiting factors rather than data transit.
  - XCSme 4y ago
    This is the main reason why I still don't open-source my commercial projects, even though people ask, "Why would I choose this? There are free alternatives!"; the projects are earning money to sustain themselves and everyone is happy (customers get better support, I can sustainably work on it, going 10 years strong now).
rco8786 4y ago
So curious about the mysterious backstory here. Considering "The Radix Project" appears to be doing the exact same thing that Fosshost is/was.
- samip537 4y ago
  Yes, but Fosshost's bitfall is that one singular person is the only person with access to critical things, like the bank and thus is the only person able to pay our bills despite having money there or there should be. The Radix Project is trying to learn from our mistakes and do them better so one doesn't face a similar issue due to a singular person having too much control.
  - mst 4y ago
    Ironic that libera's governance was set up under a similar spirit. Though frankly if Andrew Lee had ghosted freenode entirely that would've been a vast improvement overr what actually happened.
  - rvba 4y ago
    Do you know if the money wasnt stolen?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - Fordec 4y ago
    I'd be quite interested to hear the Radix Projects governance plans to prevent a future single point of failure again. Not being able to contact the bill payer on the last project isn't helplessness, it's a failure of the created organizational structures to have planned redundancy, succession and legal accountability.
dale_glass 4y ago
There's a serious lack of useful information here. "Due to circumstances outside of the control of the Fosshost volunteers, we are now in a situation where we cannot guarantee our servers will stay online, and in fact expect them to go offline shortly." and in the link: "I'm expecting the BOS datacenter to go offline in the very near future." And in their Twitter profile, they seem to be a non-profit. I presume then that they're a formal organization of some sort, and should hopefully have some sort of budget and ability to handle contingencies. So... what's going on? What is the "BOS datacenter"? How is a datacenter suddenly going offline? Why does a non-profit dedicated to hosting critically depend on a particular datacenter and can't just move to hosting stuff somewhere else? Why are links from September that might be of help explaining already a 404? Also, who are these people, and whose projects are hosted there?
- samip537 4y ago
  We are unable to pay for co-location costs, and that's why our servers will go offline as Thomas our CEO is unreacheable. He only has access to bank and thus to funds. Explaination of the DC thing at Github: https://github.com/fosshostorg/fosshost.org/blob/main/src/posts/chicago-status-update.md https://github.com/fosshostorg/fosshost.org/blob/main/src/po... (Other posts can be read from there too.) Post from three months ago regarding state of affairs: https://github.com/fosshostorg/fosshost.org/blob/main/src/posts/suspended-applications.md https://github.com/fosshostorg/fosshost.org/blob/main/src/po... Skyler, one of the last Fosshost volunteers.
  - tdeck 4y ago
    > Thomas our CEO is unreacheable. He only has access to bank and thus to funds. Does your nonprofit have a treasurer? I thought it was a legal requirement for the treasurer to be a different person from the CEO. In that case the treasurer should be able to present something on official letterhead and gain access to the account.
    - samip537 4y ago
      Not to my knowledge, or we tried but they weren't given access by our CEO so there's that.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nickelpro 4y ago
This is exactly no-name "FOSS" non-profits are a bad choice for community organizing. There's really no reason not to host on industry-standard free hosting, ie Github or Gitlab.
- throwawaysleep 4y ago
  As an outsider, using FOSS in general for anything important seems like a bad choice unless there is a giant tech firm behind it like React with Meta. It is generally so fragile as it depends on so few people.
  - marcinzm 4y ago
    And commercial software may very well be one intern copying stack overflow to keep the lights on. Until the the day they stop and shutdown the product with no further updates. For example, the issue here isn't FOSS but rather a small corporate non-profit entity. The failure being the corporate governance, finance and management.
  - ericd 4y ago
    If anything, I think commercial is much riskier to have as a core dependency - they can unilaterally change the deal on you, and if they decide to stop supporting your use case, you’re completely SOL (I’ve had a couple of very close calls with this). With open source, you can keep it running yourself, because you have the source, and you always have the option to patch it.
  - remram 4y ago
    How do you reconcile that with the fact that those company-backed projects you listed are themselves built on top of FOSS libraries?
- alyxw 4y ago
  Fosshost served a niche that Github did not cover. The general audience was people who needed raw compute — e.g. for testing service deployment, or for conducting builds without needing to change how their builds worked. They also did things like hosting for distro packages, providing domain names for projects that could have benefitted from one, etc. A big volume of tenants came from underprivileged regions or were in personal situations where they couldn't afford these themselves, and there really isn't an "industry standard" for "I need compute on a budget of $0," at least not previously. After its launch, the Oracle Free tier provided way more bang for $0, but between their bad habit of (seemingly) randomly firing their customers, and the fact that initial verification requires a credit card, this still wasn't a perfect fix. Trusting random no-name organizations isn't great, but for many people, there really wasn't a better choice if they weren't able to fulfill their needs themselves.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
trynewideas 4y ago
There was a drama with GNU Octave's hosting with Fosshost in late October that seems to have been a precipitant of all this: https://octave.discourse.group/t/fosshost-domains-down/3477?page=2 https://octave.discourse.group/t/fosshost-domains-down/3477?... As usual an inordinate amount of discussion appears to be in a Discord and is therefore unlinkable.
- bunbun69 4y ago
  Oh you can definitely link to threads, messages or channels from Discord But I shouldn’t be saying this because it goes against the Discord hate train Forums are so amazing!!!!!!
  - RF_Savage 4y ago
    Yet they are not publicly readable in anyway.
    - bunbun69 4y ago
      You can join the server. Problem solved But I shouldn't be saying this as hacker news absolutely HATES facts
  - seanw444 4y ago
    Discord is good for real-time communication. For long-lived discussions on important topics, it is objectively not a good option. The hate train is there for a reason.
cmauniada 4y ago
Ok, I tried doing this but now its blocking me from posting further. I think since it needs to keep context, jumping back and forth with ls, cd is causing issues. For my iteration there were 4 videos in the Documents folder, would have been cool to see what they videos were...
hardwaresofton 4y ago
Open source needs sustainable funding models. It's hard to tell what fosshost was and how many people are impacted. It's also unclear what the Radix project is how it will be different/avoid what caused fosshost to shut down.
- TaylorAlexander 4y ago
  My grand theory is that for a lot of reasons we need to restructure society to focus on automating most of the basic tasks required to reproduce society (basic manufacturing of shoes, farming, etc) in a collectively owned and managed way, and then provide the "dividend" of this production for free to everyone as a kind of basic support. Cheap housing, free food and clothes, basic medical care, etc. In such a world, open source devs could live off of that basic support indefinitely, rather than slowly draining savings or killing themselves working a second job to fund the open source work. I think if we did this we would see much more open innovation, which would lead to more rapid innovation, which would be good for everyone. Its more of a distant goal and doesn't solve the problem today, but its something I like to discuss as it can inform what direction we head in.
  - unity1001 4y ago
    That's the direction that the world should head in.
  - hardwaresofton 4y ago
    This sounds like a fantastic future, but I have problems imagining it actually working out that way, given how greedy humans can be. I'm not convinced by projections of UBI maybe due to my own lack of imagination. I find it difficult to imagine a world where UBI doesn't create a two-tier system -- pre-nationalization haves and have-nots. Such schemes make me imagine a world where people who built capital and became necessary (ex. Walmart) will have fresh money for their monopolies guaranteed for all time. As for the very specific problem of open source not being properly supported, I think there's a closer/easier stopgap -- monetization. Free software exists because idealists manipulating existing legal systems to meet their ends. I think we need the same thing, but in the business domain. We need hackers that are good at business just like free software needed hackers that knew enough about the legal system. Put simply -- we need more businesses who work with F/OSS and give back to it. Imagine if even .1% of Amazon's revenue was going back into the open source projects it uses across the stack. The open source world would look drastically different. I'm biased towards this solution because I'm trying to build it, but I bet I can build something to generate value for F/OSS faster than we can straighten out the allocation of society.
maltris 4y ago
Is that something publicly available where the ArchiveTeam should be involved to save data that could be otherwise forever lost?
vikramkr 4y ago
If the approach of the other people at fosshost seems to be that the response to the ceo allegedly potentially embezzling funds/derelicting duty (just walking off with control of the bank account and going dark) is simple to shrug and start a new organization, why should we trust them to operate correctly? I'm not seeing details on what the lessons learned are. If you donated money to fosshost, amd you see the ceo walk away with the money while the rest of the team just decides to start with a new name, why would you then trust that new team with a donation? This whole situation is not confidence inducing.
- nibbleshifter 4y ago
  Yeah, I wouldn't trust any of these people as far as I could throw them. I just don't think they are competent.
- colonwqbang 4y ago
  It doesn't sound like the CEO has necessarily stolen any money, just that he isn't using them to pay the bills and the board hasn't taken any action to fix the problem. This problem can likely be solved by the board simply electing a new authorised signatory from their own ranks. Assuming anyone is still around who wants to take on such a role. The fact that it hasn't happened (?) would suggest that the real problem is a general lack of interest from those involved, not just the CEO.
  - vikramkr 4y ago
    You're right, there's so many ways they could have intervened. It also seems pretty clear that they do want to take on such a role, since they've gone ahead and created another organization that does the same thing. It's so baffling that they seem to think the way to go about it is to give up on regaining control of the organizations funds and start a new one, and expect that people will just trust the new one somehow
pabs3 4y ago
What services was Fosshost hosting and who were they hosting for?
pabs3 4y ago
I note there is a copy of their old site here: https://fossho.st/ https://fossho.st/
SamWhited 4y ago
My big concern with this whole thing is that users weren't alerted as far as I can tell. I happened to visit the website for the first time in ages and saw the news, but if I hadn't done that I would never have known until my site went offline (I guess only users on Twitter got notified). Anyways, alternative suggestions welcome, our open source project has no money for hosting and has a few services outside of our static site that actually need a VPN to run. A small 1CPU 512MB box (or whatever it was) was plenty for us as we're not big, but we can't afford to buy that from anyone and now we're having to scramble to ask related businesses who use our stuff for sponsorship and hope one of them comes through.
Havoc 4y ago
Bus factor 1 strikes yet again
- jlokier 4y ago
  Not as much as it looks. It seems there's currently another director who could use the available legal mechanisms to take over from the missing director-CEO but is not doing so, and previously a board that resigned rather than use the available legal mechanisms (which would be easier for a group of them). The organisation is a CIC, which means it is regulated, and has a constitution whereby a non-responsive director-CEO can be removed, and indeed places a duty on the other directors to do so if that's what it takes, which they haven't done. It is possible that the rest of the board was derelict in their legal duties by resigning if they knew what the consequences would be. Even if there are no directors left, or only an unresponsive one, the collective owners of the organisation have a right to get together and install a new one, and there are legal mechanisms to do that if there's no director or secretary to do the administration in the usual way. The keys to the bank account will be provided to the other director or new directors if they show to the bank's satisfaction that they have the right to them.

177 points by SamWhited 4y ago

I never heard of Fosshost, but based on the name it was supposed to provide free hosting for open-source projects. What was the plan to sustain it?

alyxw 4y ago
Pray for the goodwill of DCs and donations, mostly. Ampere had provided a very generous amount of hardware. Actually putting that hardware into places was a lot of finding DCs willing to support the project.
sacnoradhq 4y ago
Wishful thinking perhaps. This is the problem of inherently unsustainable, poorly-governed, amateur operations: they're houses of cards waiting to fall apart. If someone wants hosting, then pay for real VPS or colo. Electricity, rack space, and cooling are usually the limiting factors rather than data transit.
- XCSme 4y ago
  This is the main reason why I still don't open-source my commercial projects, even though people ask, "Why would I choose this? There are free alternatives!"; the projects are earning money to sustain themselves and everyone is happy (customers get better support, I can sustainably work on it, going 10 years strong now).

rco8786 4y ago

So curious about the mysterious backstory here. Considering "The Radix Project" appears to be doing the exact same thing that Fosshost is/was.

samip537 4y ago
Yes, but Fosshost's bitfall is that one singular person is the only person with access to critical things, like the bank and thus is the only person able to pay our bills despite having money there or there should be. The Radix Project is trying to learn from our mistakes and do them better so one doesn't face a similar issue due to a singular person having too much control.
- mst 4y ago
  Ironic that libera's governance was set up under a similar spirit. Though frankly if Andrew Lee had ghosted freenode entirely that would've been a vast improvement overr what actually happened.
- rvba 4y ago
  Do you know if the money wasnt stolen?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- Fordec 4y ago
  I'd be quite interested to hear the Radix Projects governance plans to prevent a future single point of failure again. Not being able to contact the bill payer on the last project isn't helplessness, it's a failure of the created organizational structures to have planned redundancy, succession and legal accountability.

dale_glass 4y ago

There's a serious lack of useful information here. "Due to circumstances outside of the control of the Fosshost volunteers, we are now in a situation where we cannot guarantee our servers will stay online, and in fact expect them to go offline shortly." and in the link: "I'm expecting the BOS datacenter to go offline in the very near future." And in their Twitter profile, they seem to be a non-profit. I presume then that they're a formal organization of some sort, and should hopefully have some sort of budget and ability to handle contingencies. So... what's going on? What is the "BOS datacenter"? How is a datacenter suddenly going offline? Why does a non-profit dedicated to hosting critically depend on a particular datacenter and can't just move to hosting stuff somewhere else? Why are links from September that might be of help explaining already a 404? Also, who are these people, and whose projects are hosted there?

samip537 4y ago
We are unable to pay for co-location costs, and that's why our servers will go offline as Thomas our CEO is unreacheable. He only has access to bank and thus to funds. Explaination of the DC thing at Github: https://github.com/fosshostorg/fosshost.org/blob/main/src/posts/chicago-status-update.md https://github.com/fosshostorg/fosshost.org/blob/main/src/po... (Other posts can be read from there too.) Post from three months ago regarding state of affairs: https://github.com/fosshostorg/fosshost.org/blob/main/src/posts/suspended-applications.md https://github.com/fosshostorg/fosshost.org/blob/main/src/po... Skyler, one of the last Fosshost volunteers.
- tdeck 4y ago
  > Thomas our CEO is unreacheable. He only has access to bank and thus to funds. Does your nonprofit have a treasurer? I thought it was a legal requirement for the treasurer to be a different person from the CEO. In that case the treasurer should be able to present something on official letterhead and gain access to the account.
  - samip537 4y ago
    Not to my knowledge, or we tried but they weren't given access by our CEO so there's that.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

nickelpro 4y ago

This is exactly no-name "FOSS" non-profits are a bad choice for community organizing. There's really no reason not to host on industry-standard free hosting, ie Github or Gitlab.

throwawaysleep 4y ago
As an outsider, using FOSS in general for anything important seems like a bad choice unless there is a giant tech firm behind it like React with Meta. It is generally so fragile as it depends on so few people.
- marcinzm 4y ago
  And commercial software may very well be one intern copying stack overflow to keep the lights on. Until the the day they stop and shutdown the product with no further updates. For example, the issue here isn't FOSS but rather a small corporate non-profit entity. The failure being the corporate governance, finance and management.
- ericd 4y ago
  If anything, I think commercial is much riskier to have as a core dependency - they can unilaterally change the deal on you, and if they decide to stop supporting your use case, you’re completely SOL (I’ve had a couple of very close calls with this). With open source, you can keep it running yourself, because you have the source, and you always have the option to patch it.
- remram 4y ago
  How do you reconcile that with the fact that those company-backed projects you listed are themselves built on top of FOSS libraries?
alyxw 4y ago
Fosshost served a niche that Github did not cover. The general audience was people who needed raw compute — e.g. for testing service deployment, or for conducting builds without needing to change how their builds worked. They also did things like hosting for distro packages, providing domain names for projects that could have benefitted from one, etc. A big volume of tenants came from underprivileged regions or were in personal situations where they couldn't afford these themselves, and there really isn't an "industry standard" for "I need compute on a budget of $0," at least not previously. After its launch, the Oracle Free tier provided way more bang for $0, but between their bad habit of (seemingly) randomly firing their customers, and the fact that initial verification requires a credit card, this still wasn't a perfect fix. Trusting random no-name organizations isn't great, but for many people, there really wasn't a better choice if they weren't able to fulfill their needs themselves.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

trynewideas 4y ago

There was a drama with GNU Octave's hosting with Fosshost in late October that seems to have been a precipitant of all this: https://octave.discourse.group/t/fosshost-domains-down/3477?page=2 https://octave.discourse.group/t/fosshost-domains-down/3477?... As usual an inordinate amount of discussion appears to be in a Discord and is therefore unlinkable.

bunbun69 4y ago
Oh you can definitely link to threads, messages or channels from Discord But I shouldn’t be saying this because it goes against the Discord hate train Forums are so amazing!!!!!!
- RF_Savage 4y ago
  Yet they are not publicly readable in anyway.
  - bunbun69 4y ago
    You can join the server. Problem solved But I shouldn't be saying this as hacker news absolutely HATES facts
- seanw444 4y ago
  Discord is good for real-time communication. For long-lived discussions on important topics, it is objectively not a good option. The hate train is there for a reason.

cmauniada 4y ago

Ok, I tried doing this but now its blocking me from posting further. I think since it needs to keep context, jumping back and forth with ls, cd is causing issues. For my iteration there were 4 videos in the Documents folder, would have been cool to see what they videos were...

hardwaresofton 4y ago

Open source needs sustainable funding models. It's hard to tell what fosshost was and how many people are impacted. It's also unclear what the Radix project is how it will be different/avoid what caused fosshost to shut down.

TaylorAlexander 4y ago
My grand theory is that for a lot of reasons we need to restructure society to focus on automating most of the basic tasks required to reproduce society (basic manufacturing of shoes, farming, etc) in a collectively owned and managed way, and then provide the "dividend" of this production for free to everyone as a kind of basic support. Cheap housing, free food and clothes, basic medical care, etc. In such a world, open source devs could live off of that basic support indefinitely, rather than slowly draining savings or killing themselves working a second job to fund the open source work. I think if we did this we would see much more open innovation, which would lead to more rapid innovation, which would be good for everyone. Its more of a distant goal and doesn't solve the problem today, but its something I like to discuss as it can inform what direction we head in.
- unity1001 4y ago
  That's the direction that the world should head in.
- hardwaresofton 4y ago
  This sounds like a fantastic future, but I have problems imagining it actually working out that way, given how greedy humans can be. I'm not convinced by projections of UBI maybe due to my own lack of imagination. I find it difficult to imagine a world where UBI doesn't create a two-tier system -- pre-nationalization haves and have-nots. Such schemes make me imagine a world where people who built capital and became necessary (ex. Walmart) will have fresh money for their monopolies guaranteed for all time. As for the very specific problem of open source not being properly supported, I think there's a closer/easier stopgap -- monetization. Free software exists because idealists manipulating existing legal systems to meet their ends. I think we need the same thing, but in the business domain. We need hackers that are good at business just like free software needed hackers that knew enough about the legal system. Put simply -- we need more businesses who work with F/OSS and give back to it. Imagine if even .1% of Amazon's revenue was going back into the open source projects it uses across the stack. The open source world would look drastically different. I'm biased towards this solution because I'm trying to build it, but I bet I can build something to generate value for F/OSS faster than we can straighten out the allocation of society.

maltris 4y ago

Is that something publicly available where the ArchiveTeam should be involved to save data that could be otherwise forever lost?

vikramkr 4y ago

If the approach of the other people at fosshost seems to be that the response to the ceo allegedly potentially embezzling funds/derelicting duty (just walking off with control of the bank account and going dark) is simple to shrug and start a new organization, why should we trust them to operate correctly? I'm not seeing details on what the lessons learned are. If you donated money to fosshost, amd you see the ceo walk away with the money while the rest of the team just decides to start with a new name, why would you then trust that new team with a donation? This whole situation is not confidence inducing.

nibbleshifter 4y ago
Yeah, I wouldn't trust any of these people as far as I could throw them. I just don't think they are competent.
colonwqbang 4y ago
It doesn't sound like the CEO has necessarily stolen any money, just that he isn't using them to pay the bills and the board hasn't taken any action to fix the problem. This problem can likely be solved by the board simply electing a new authorised signatory from their own ranks. Assuming anyone is still around who wants to take on such a role. The fact that it hasn't happened (?) would suggest that the real problem is a general lack of interest from those involved, not just the CEO.
- vikramkr 4y ago
  You're right, there's so many ways they could have intervened. It also seems pretty clear that they do want to take on such a role, since they've gone ahead and created another organization that does the same thing. It's so baffling that they seem to think the way to go about it is to give up on regaining control of the organizations funds and start a new one, and expect that people will just trust the new one somehow

pabs3 4y ago

What services was Fosshost hosting and who were they hosting for?

pabs3 4y ago

I note there is a copy of their old site here: https://fossho.st/ https://fossho.st/

SamWhited 4y ago

My big concern with this whole thing is that users weren't alerted as far as I can tell. I happened to visit the website for the first time in ages and saw the news, but if I hadn't done that I would never have known until my site went offline (I guess only users on Twitter got notified). Anyways, alternative suggestions welcome, our open source project has no money for hosting and has a few services outside of our static site that actually need a VPN to run. A small 1CPU 512MB box (or whatever it was) was plenty for us as we're not big, but we can't afford to buy that from anyone and now we're having to scramble to ask related businesses who use our stuff for sponsorship and hope one of them comes through.

Havoc 4y ago

Bus factor 1 strikes yet again

jlokier 4y ago
Not as much as it looks. It seems there's currently another director who could use the available legal mechanisms to take over from the missing director-CEO but is not doing so, and previously a board that resigned rather than use the available legal mechanisms (which would be easier for a group of them). The organisation is a CIC, which means it is regulated, and has a constitution whereby a non-responsive director-CEO can be removed, and indeed places a duty on the other directors to do so if that's what it takes, which they haven't done. It is possible that the rest of the board was derelict in their legal duties by resigning if they knew what the consequences would be. Even if there are no directors left, or only an unresponsive one, the collective owners of the organisation have a right to get together and install a new one, and there are legal mechanisms to do that if there's no director or secretary to do the administration in the usual way. The keys to the bank account will be provided to the other director or new directors if they show to the bank's satisfaction that they have the right to them.