X.Org BoD meeting minutes 2020-02-27

[Daniel Vetter]

On Fri, Feb 28, 2020 at 11:46 AM Lucas Stach <l.stach at pengutronix.de> wrote:
>
> On Fr, 2020-02-28 at 08:39 +0100, Daniel Vetter wrote:
> > On Fri, Feb 28, 2020 at 1:37 AM Luc Verhaegen <libv at skynet.be> wrote:
> > > On Thu, Feb 27, 2020 at 03:49:07PM -0500, Lyude Paul wrote:
> > > > ## Items discussed
> > > >
> > > > ITEM: Cloud hosting for freedesktop.org
> > > > X.org is running out of money, and at the current rate we're losing money we'd
> > > > need to close CI by May or June this year in order to keep operating. Google
> > > > offered to hire someone to admin fd.o so long as they get to pick who it is,
> > > > board votes to approve. Board also votes to approve sending out announcement
> > > > asking for sponsors onto the mailing lists ASAP.
> > > > ACTIONS: Daniel Vetter to draft announcement asking for sponsors onto mailing
> > > > lists.
> > > > STATUS: Pending
> > >
> > > So this was what it was all about then. Money.
> > >
> > > I knew there was something fishy when the mighty few of fd.o wanted to
> > > go down this path.
> > >
> > > I had hoped that we would gain transparency and oversight on how fd.o
> > > was run. To me, and the gitlab conversion of radeonhd was another
> > > smashing example (one in a long row of sordid actions or... fortunate
> > > inactions?), there was no increase in transparency or oversight in the
> > > dealings of fd.o in the year or so that this change was decided.
> > >
> > > How much was xorg burning through each year before fd.o?
> > >
> > > When this fd.o merge thing was proposed to the xorg members, did we at
> > > all get told about this extra cost now falling onto the x.org
> > > foundation? Did we get told about the extent of these costs?
> > >
> > > Pretty f-ing shameless stuff.
> >
> > Seriously no.
> >
> > The _entire_ growth here happened under the X.org's boards overwatch,
> > roughly in the past year. fd.o had a budget of roughly zero (including
> > when we started gitlab.fd.o) with quite considerable financial
> > reserves.
>
> The main problem here is the entire lack of transparency. How much did
> the fd.o merger contribute to the X.Org foundation reserves? Where was
> the decision made how to use those funds?

Super rough sketch, from the top of my head, I didn't check the
numbers but should be roughly accurate. Back when I started on the
board we had about 30k funds. Iirc fd.o brought in something around
10k. Current (Jan this year, Feb hasn't ended yet) balance is 75k.

So we've very much sunk the ship the past few years, I do think the
board has been rather financially responsible. Before this fd.o thread
here the most common critique I've actually heard is people being
unhappy with us hoarding too much money, but the board made clear
decisions to keep sufficient amounts of cash reserves in case sponsors
suddenly disappear, or something else unplanned happened.

The other bit to keep in mind is that the real growth in fd.o only
really started in Oct/Nov last year, and was for a bit hidden by
Google's donation of 30k credits. Combine that with everyone's just a
volunteer it took us maybe 1-2 months longer to realize the current
burn rate than if we'd have professional staff and admins. It happens,
but since we know we're volunteers and so something things take
longer, that's why we have the hefty cash flow reserve after all.

Also note that the limit we've set is a bit short of 50k, That'll be
plenty enough to run X.org (with fd.o and XDC) for quite a while even
if suddenly all sponsors disappear too.

> I'm totally on-board with the X.Org foundation sponsoring and thus
> providing solid hosting for the projects on fd.o, it just seems to me
> that there was no discussion about the amount of money X.Org is willing
> to spend on this (at least I don't remember any board voting on this).
> Currently it seems that the fd.o hosting is kind of a "whatever it
> costs to keep things running" expense.

Iirc we've lump sum approved all existing fd.o expenses and running
operations after the merger, and gitlab was on there already (in the
relevant board@ threads at least). But yeah we've not done a proper
budget, like we've pretty much never done any solid budgeting for
anything ever - we where small enough for that to really not matter.
But solid budgeting for hosting needs solid data about usage, which
means we need to have admins work on improved logging and analysis.
Which brings us back that it's all volunteer run, so will be slow
going to get there. But we're working on it.
-Daniel
-- 
Daniel Vetter
Software Engineer, Intel Corporation
+41 (0) 79 365 57 48 - http://blog.ffwll.ch