X.Org To Proceed Migrating Their Code & Bugs To GitLab

[daniels]

This is a case they cannot take care of their own domain. If x.org was more financially sound this would be different.



bridgman please do not say freedesktop and x.org is interchangeable there are not.

If you dig a little

https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/

The reality here is freedesktop project has very stable long term home with very stable sponsoring parties. Intel and HP provided hardware to freedesktop at the start have have been providing hardware ever since. Google and Collabora are the newest parties.

https://www.x.org/wiki/

x.org these days is part of "Software in the Public Interest, Inc."(SPI) You have to remember before coming part of SPI x.org also lost their domain due to failing to pay the domain bill. Just read down that front page and notice they still mention Sun as existing company.

Reality X.org has history of horrible management and not a stable stream of funds let alone a stream of hardware.
Freedesktop has had history decent management back up by stream of hardware with properly paid administrators and a proper stream of funds.

The reality here is X.org is not financially able to take care of their own servers. its only really kindness by freedesktop that has kept x.org with hosting. Old saying applies beggars cannot be choosers. In this relationship X.org is the beggar. Since freedesktop already was migrating to it own gitlab party to reduce it own overheads x.org kind has to toe the line.

Its something with all the graphics card vendors they have never worked out how to fund x.org so it can take care of itself.

Almost everything in this post is completely wrong. fd.o have hosted X.Org (who are also part of SPI) development for about 14 years now. The two were historically different, but these days are in fact quite similar. fd.o doesn't itself pay for admin time, and X.Org has greater finances than fd.o does. Part of the reason people are happy to sponsor fd.o is exactly because it hosts X.Org and graphics development.

None of this has anything to do with the X.Org domain (whose DNS is hosted by fd.o). The domain nearly lapsed a while ago because of history which predates the X.Org Foundation - the domain was personally owned by someone who no longer wanted to be involved but also repeatedly refused to transfer the domain until the last second. The Foundation board spent years upon years trying to resolve it, and it was only the bad publicity which forced the issue forward. They were very proactive about it and had a fallback domain registered in place and made sure all the services worked with the new domain, in the very worst case that the old domain continued to be held hostage from them through no fault of their own.

None of this had anything to do with 'failing to pay the bill'. They can easily pay the bill, in the same way that they manage to pay the stipend for EVoC every year, and manage to fund travel to XDC for developers who could not otherwise attend.

I have no idea why you are so committed to making up complete nonsense to slander X.Org.

-daniel (primary fd.o admin since 2004, former X.Org board member)

[DrYak]

but what wanted to convey is general unhappiness with hundreds if not thousands of project moving to GL just for sole reason - MS has bought Github.

Some are moving in reaction of MS's acquisition, some are moving for other reasons.

To elaborate on Bridgeman's post :

This is not a move from Github to Gitlab, it is a move from <something else> to Gitlab.

In the past Freedesktop.org used to host their code repos themselves on their own servers, using free/libre open tools.
(again, not using GitHub in the past).

That used to be cgit (ugly, but it is a git repo), bugzilla tracker, and mailing lists.
These were more or less functional but not as feature-ful as nowadays' modern tools.
(again, not using GitHub but cgit+bugzilla).

So FDo decided to change infrastructure :

- Github was outright impossible to begin with, even before the MS acquisition (As pointed in the article).
As they only provided cloud hosted solution for users such as FD.o
There *is* a self-hosted solution called "Github Enterprise", but:
1. it's expensive and it's enterprise only,
2. it's not opensource.
(so: they never stepped in github to begin with)

- Gitlab was the preferred solution. In addition the the gitlab.com website, there is the "Gitlab Community Edition" an open source.
It supports more or less the same set feature as GitHub and many modern tools (unlike the older stuff, specially cgit).
It's opensource.
So it's possible for FD.o to run it on their own servers.


They could have also went with Gogs (another opensource, self-hostable, modern Git repo). But there's no technical possibility to achieve the same on GitHub
(until the day Microsoft decides to release som "GitHub Community Edition").


So, TL;DR:
FD.o picking GitLab has absolutely nothing to do with the GitHub being bought out by MS (it predates) and entirely to do with the fact that they've always ran opensource tools on their own server and GitLab allows them to keep doing so.

What I liked in Github is it provided easy way to contribute in many many OS project without a fuss. Now it's being ruined.

Huh?
GitHub provides more or less the same set of features as any other modern Git hosting platform (except the above mentioned self-hosting).

And git is distributed in nature :
You can clone any git repo into any other git repo no matter what the underlying platform.

Make your edit locally and send a patch upstream.
(plain git can automatically generate an e-mail with the patches for you).
Any public git repo can allow you to pull the modification into your own local repo).
(from the git protocol internal perspective: git command line doesn't give a shit what platform a peculiar remote is running. git even supports plug-in for non-git remotes (e.g.: cvs, svn, hg) )

If some devs are too doof to accept patches delivered through anything but the peculiar web-site they're runing on, they're either stupid or don't master git well enough.

[oiaohm]

Part of the reason people are happy to sponsor fd.o is exactly because it hosts X.Org and graphics development.

I like how you say part because this allows you to skip over facts about.

HP backed freedesktop before they hosted x.org this is linked to HP link with Debian. So HP support has very little to do with X.org and graphics development being there. Collabora is another party linked to debian and due to their link to libreoffice and other parts like it the freedesktop standards are important. So both those would be supporting freedesktop with or without x.org and graphics development.

Yes you are right freedesktop does not pay its administration time. Collabora does. X.org is a mooching as X.org foundation is not putting in any direct money either to hardware or administration. If HP and Collabora got together at a debian meet up and decide that freedesktop was not going to host X,org any more it would be a could be done deal.

X.org foundation still has horrible management. "not a stable stream of funds let alone a stream of hardware" I stand by this. There is not a stable stream of funds from X.org foundation to freedesktop to make sure X.org foundation board has a say in freedesktop actions so at least some control over hosting and are directly making sure that like AMD.... could be giving hardware to free-desktop for a build/qa servers. So taking some resonsablity to make sure freedesktop has the money it needs and the hardware it needs to support x.org site.

None of this has anything to do with the X.Org domain (whose DNS is hosted by fd.o). The domain nearly lapsed a while ago because of history which predates the X.Org Foundation - the domain was personally owned by someone who no longer wanted to be involved but also repeatedly refused to transfer the domain until the last second. The Foundation board spent years upon years trying to resolve it, and it was only the bad publicity which forced the issue forward. They were very proactive about it and had a fallback domain registered in place and made sure all the services worked with the new domain, in the very worst case that the old domain continued to be held hostage from them through no fault of their own.

None of this had anything to do with 'failing to pay the bill'. They can easily pay the bill, in the same way that they manage to pay the stipend for EVoC every year, and manage to fund travel to XDC for developers who could not otherwise attend.

This is reference the second domain issue. The first domain issue is when freedesktop started hosting X.org. That is when that private person bought the domain and allowed you to keep on using who you had trouble getting it back from latter.

I have no idea why you are so committed to making up complete nonsense to slander X.Org.

-daniel (primary fd.o admin since 2004, former X.Org board member)

The problem here you have forgot that freedesktop is one entity and xorg is a different one.

Thing to remember a person/entity can be all buddy bubby with a so call mooch friend and everything seam good. Until the day that person/entity decides they are sick of putting up being mooched off of and then the mooch finds themselves in all kinds of trouble.

This is why is very important to be aware where the lines between entities are and make sure if you depend on an entity do something for you that you are not being a mooch.

The reality like it or not what I said is not slander. Its how X.org is treating freedesktop and why x.org is there in the first place. Really with the funds X.org has now there is no reason why it still being a mooch. If X.org was putting money into freedesktop for administration and so on then you would be two organisations that are truly close. Please note due to freedesktop doing stuff outside what X.org needs I am not saying X.org has to foot 100 percent of the administration bill.

The relationship between freedesktop and x.org need serous work to make it a legal relationship and being legal means there will be a direct financial relationship instead of we are friends and praying that one day there is not a conflict of interest where x.org loses.

[daniels]

No, I'm really not forgetting how these organisations work; I also work for Collabora and have done for the past 10 years, so yes, I know what's going on there. HP's decision to sponsor make a one-off donation to fd.o for hardware gives them no ongoing influence on the organisation. Collabora's sponsorship of fd.o admin time (which these days is exclusively when I take time to work on fd.o; Tollef left Collabora a while back) long predates Collabora Productivity and our involvement with LibreOffice, and our primary interest in it is as a platform for graphics development (which we do a lot of).

X.Org isn't mooching off 'us', largely because 'we' are the same people as 'them'. fd.o offered voluntarily to host X.Org and we've never asked for anything since. The X.Org Foundation does a great job of making conferences like XDC happen, where we can all get together and discuss things every year. They do that and we keep the servers ticking over. Both sides (and yes, I am speaking 100% authoriatively for freedesktop.org here) are happy with this.

You're right that the relationship needs to be better defined, but let's be clear: everything else you've written is nonsense. You've invented it based on nothing. You are trying to create the story that X.Org are abusing fd.o, and that is completely untrue. I don't know why you're doing this.

[dfx.]

Holy shiiiiiit, look at these schmucks trying to "educate" X/FD developers and admins about their own organizations -_-

[oiaohm]

X.Org isn't mooching off 'us', largely because 'we' are the same people as 'them'.

This is how classic conflict of interest events happen. What happens if the day ever comes that you have diverging interests.

Holy shiiiiiit, look at these schmucks trying to "educate" X/FD developers and admins about their own organizations -_-

Reality here sometime outside third parties do have to point out when two organisations due to over lapping staff are forgotting that they are two different organisation. Always what happens in this case is one mooches off the other until they get upset.

You're right that the relationship needs to be better defined, but let's be clear: everything else you've written is nonsense. You've invented it based on nothing. You are trying to create the story that X.Org are abusing fd.o, and that is completely untrue. I don't know why you're doing this.

What I have written is not based on nothing. It based on your current legal status totally ignoring staff overlap and correctly treating freedesktop and x11 as the two independent legal entities they are. I would avoid you visit legal quickly. Most jurisdictions it is a criminal offence to have conflict of interest when it comes to decision making,

It could be possible that there is too much management overlap between x.org and freedesktop resulting in the mess that you legally freedesktop should not be giving x,org resources because you have no one without conflict of interest to approve giving resources so effectively x.org is a criminal stealing from freedesktop added and abetted by staff with conflict of interest. Yes conflict of interest laws can in fact be triggers for organisational merges. It possible that freedesktop and X.org are already deep in that hole,

Basically you can dig your self into a very deep legal hole very quickly when you forgot where the boundaries between legal entities are.

Reality here the relationship need to be better defined. The large volume of shared staff means you need to serous look at if x.org remains existing as a entity or does it just come a sub department of freedesktop because it may not be possible long term to have enough people without conflict of interest to keep freedesktop giving x.org resources.

This is the problem with mooching its not very legal. Relationships need to be formal to be safe long term. If X.org was paying freedesktop for the resources this would not be stealing and could be written fair commercial arrangement so avoiding possible conflict of interest.