X.Org BoD meeting minutes 2020-02-27

[Luc Verhaegen]

On Fri, Feb 28, 2020 at 07:29:51PM +0100, Daniel Vetter wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 28, 2020 at 7:06 PM Lucas Stach <l.stach at pengutronix.de> wrote:
> >
> > The only trace of a rough ballpark figure for gitlab hosting expenses
> > was in some board meeting IRC logs [1] where the number of 30k/year was
> > floated. Even board members seemed to be surprised by this number.
> 
> We've had a few threads on board@ but I checked, and we seem to have
> indeed dropped the formal vote on this somehow. Was quite a busy time
> with xdc19 papers committee and our favorite xdc20 proposal folding,
> plus everyone on vacation.
> 
> But that was on my secretary watch and definitely shouldn't have happened :-(

Can this be broken down:
* who decided on the move to gitlab
* who decided on cloud hosting at google
* who did not notice running a tab 2.5x the amount of googles 
  sponsorship. Would 30k of google cloud hosting have had red warning 
  lights flashing in... august 2019?

> Please note that we've just had a very successful xdc18 with a massive
> surplus and opted to double the sponsoring amounts for xdc19 (to
> rather great success). So 30k is definitely a lot for the old pre-spi
> X.org, but the entire point of the SPI merger was to get sponsors on
> board for hard money (not just in-kind donations and stuff), and that
> worked out really well.

So the partially pending fd.o merger (how far along is this anyway?) did 
not improve transparency and did not increase oversight.

How on earth do you convince any sponsor to give their money to x.org 
now?

> 30k wasn't something we could just pay
> forever, but easily something we could pay for a year if Google drops
> and we'd need to find someone else.

And yet the bill is 2.5x that, and that did not happen overnight.

Luc Verhaegen.