gitlab.fd.o financial situation and impact on services

[Luc Verhaegen]

On Thu, Feb 27, 2020 at 10:27:04PM +0100, Daniel Vetter wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> You might have read the short take in the X.org board meeting minutes
> already, here's the long version.
> 
> The good news: gitlab.fd.o has become very popular with our
> communities, and is used extensively. This especially includes all the
> CI integration. Modern development process and tooling, yay!
> 
> The bad news: The cost in growth has also been tremendous, and it's
> breaking our bank account. With reasonable estimates for continued
> growth we're expecting hosting expenses totalling 75k USD this year,
> and 90k USD next year. With the current sponsors we've set up we can't
> sustain that. We estimate that hosting expenses for gitlab.fd.o
> without any of the CI features enabled would total 30k USD, which is
> within X.org's ability to support through various sponsorships, mostly
> through XDC.
> 
> Note that X.org does no longer sponsor any CI runners themselves,
> we've stopped that. The huge additional expenses are all just in
> storing and serving build artifacts and images to outside CI runners
> sponsored by various companies. A related topic is that with the
> growth in fd.o it's becoming infeasible to maintain it all on
> volunteer admin time. X.org is therefore also looking for admin
> sponsorship, at least medium term.
> 
> Assuming that we want cash flow reserves for one year of gitlab.fd.o
> (without CI support) and a trimmed XDC and assuming no sponsor payment
> meanwhile, we'd have to cut CI services somewhere between May and June
> this year. The board is of course working on acquiring sponsors, but
> filling a shortfall of this magnitude is neither easy nor quick work,
> and we therefore decided to give an early warning as soon as possible.
> Any help in finding sponsors for fd.o is very much appreciated.
> 
> Thanks, Daniel

So this cost is all about fd.o?

I feel that this was not communicated to x.org members at all, when fd.o 
"merging" was suggested. In as far as this was a merge.

Luc Verhaegen.