On Sun, 3 Nov 2019 at 12:50, Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Stephen John Smoogen wrote: > > These systems are not small tasks to keep up and running.. the > > upstream code is not 'static' or backportable so you are constantly > > updating to upstream to keep up with CVE security. There are also > > regular schema changes and a ton of packaging items which need someone > > who is going to become a discourse expert to run. Our experience has > > been that we either end up having a system which is broken a lot > > because it isn't being maintained or is taking up so much time that > > Fedora people complain we aren't working on getting a compose out the > > door. > > > > So instead we decided to invest money into a company which pays the > > authors of discourse (and we previously paid the person who wrote > > askbot). That means we do lose absolute control but we do fund the > > upstream. > > Yet, this means that we are experiencing exactly the kind of lock-in that we > claim to free us and our users from. > > Having to pay extra for some features (as the hosted version of Discourse > does it) is lock-in. (Interestingly, unlike, e.g., Gitlab, Discourse > apparently does not follow this same crippleware strategy for the self- > hosted version, they state that all features are provided as Free (Libre) > Software and at no cost (if you self-host the application). Only the hosted > version of Discourse does market segmentation.) > > Having no way to migrate the data when switching to a different platform is > lock-in, too. I do not disagree with you on this. I also know we don't have a larger number of system administrators, servers and time to do all the things many community members 'expect a project to have'. We have the resources to do one set of things excellently, two well, and three or more poorly. The problem is that everyone seems to want 3 or more things from us which combinatoric-ally end up being massive. We can either not offer those items, outsource them, or do them poorly and shut it down like everything from asterisk to various previous forum attempts. I personally would prefer if the world stopped moving to the 'the next big social thing' every 6 months which needs all new tooling and setup.. but I have also learned that hasn't happened in 4000 years... -- Stephen J Smoogen. _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx