Hi all,

Following up with an update on this!

First of all, big thanks to Sebastian for taking the bull by the horns and not just asking, but doing; and to Karen for offering the SFC's BBB platform.

We now have set up our own Jitsi - thanks to Steve W! Steve tested it with a few SPDXers in various time zones and it seemed to work fine. We will use it for the next General Meeting, this Thursday. Phil will send the link and dial-in info in his meeting reminder. Assuming there are no problems or major complaints, we will use it going forward for the General Meeting and Phil will send an updated invite at that point.

As to Sebastian's query regarding using Sourcehut (instead of Github) and a rebuild of the website using that/a different tool. I think there is going to be very little appetite for that! It took a long time to fully move over to Github as it was! Any change of this type involves a fair amount of work and disruption to the normal flow of things. We certainly have enough going on right now to not add more to the plate!

Thanks,

Jilayne
SPDX legal team co-lead

On 4/14/21 6:31 AM, Sebastian wrote:

Dear Steve,

I'm pleased to be able to confirm that we are arranging for the LF to
cover the cost of 8x8's Jitsi hosting for SPDX meetings. I'm getting
this set up and will aim to have it in place shortly ...

That is great to hear! With the commercial Jitsi hosting that you have
arranged and the Software Freedom Conservancy's BigBlueButton as a
contingency platform, we should be very well set up for conferencing.

Many thanks to all of you for your feedback and comments on this
topic.  Sebastian, thank you especially for investigating this and for
your efforts looking into Jitsi hosting.

Clearly I shall need to contact Fosshost to withdraw from their Jitsi
hosting offer. However, given that Fosshost have accepted SPDX as a
beneficiary of their services, I'd like to propose that we take this
opportunity to adopt Sourcehut for collaboration.

Sourcehut is a suite of free and open source tools that I've been keenly
following the development of and using for my personal projects. It's
capabilities include Git repositories, mailing lists, issue tracking,
static site hosting and even a full CI/CD pipeline. These are all
modular; they can be used independently or together at will.

Compared to GitHub, Groups.io and other platforms that we are currently
using, Sourcehut would grant us more autonomy. I believe it would be of
enormous value to many potential contributors to SPDX: sending patches
and issues does not require using proprietary software, and in many
cases doesn't even require an account - Sourcehut is based around email!
It is also much better in accessibility than the alternatives.

I've done some research into the installation and also got in touch with
a friend who self-hosted Sourcehut last year; it seems like something I
would be able to run myself or with others of the SPDX Tech team. Indeed
the Sourcehut monthly meeting is this Friday, so any interested members
of this list could take the opportunity to query the platform's creator
himself!

We needn't move off our existing software in a hurry. Given Sourcehut's
architecture this could happen in stages. A rebuild of spdx.dev as a
static side (briefly discussed in the last General Meeting) seems like a
perfect first step.

How about I reply to Fosshost to see if they are happy to exchange the
offer of video conferencing hosting to a VPS for evaluating Sourcehut?

Quite a lot to think about, I know! As always I'm always happy to try
and answer any questions here or on IRC/Gitter.

Best wishes,

Sebastian