flathub update / mini infrastructure fundraiser

[Robert McQueen]

Hi all,

Just a quick e-mail to update on what I've been doing with Flathub
seeing as we've missed the calls for the past couple of weeks (although
I hope we can meet again on Monday)?

I've made a few notes at
https://github.com/flathub/flathub/wiki/Launch-Todo but it would be good
to update with the stuff I'm missing - am sure we're missing lots of
stuff as I know Nuritzi and Michael have been working on some
launch/communications planning too.

Legal:

The GNOME Foundation agreed to support Flathub by offering the support
of their legal advisors, so I sat down last week with Neil McGovern and
sent out our initial queries/requests to get the ball rolling on the
contributor/uploader agreement and end-user terms of use. We're waiting
to hear back with a confirmation about who can do the work.

Infrastructure:

GNOME has offered that their sysadmin (Andrea Veri) can help with some
of the set-up/monitoring but we'd like to keep the Flathub
infrastructure independent from GNOME's so that we can make our own
decisions about eg, making it easier to install proprietary apps,
collecting donations for app authors, etc.

We've got donated build nodes from Codethink and cloud credit from
Scaleway, but we're still "squished" in with 6-7 VMs on our 50 EUR /
month credit - and it's a bit of a production blocker as it's not the
most reliable (LVM + nbd = already broke last weekend :/) and has no
redundancy/backups in place.

The thinking is that for the time being, rather than going Full Cloud
(tm) we can just get "a server" to host the main repo and buildbot
master, and use other hosts/nodes as build slaves, frontends, mirrors,
etc - more distributed workloads where it's easier to integrate
different providers and transient cloud instances.

A UK-based ISP (Mythic Beasts) has offered that if we pay their basic
co-location fee of 800 GBP / year, they will donate a server (2x1TB
RAID, 2-4 cores, 8-16GB RAM), 100TB/month bandwidth, monitoring and
management services, so we're hoping to move forwards with that plan
this week.

Fundraise:

To get the initial server ordered, we're trying to raise the necessary
800 GBP today - thanks to the generosity of #flatpak we've actually
already raised 532 this morning. For convenience and considering it's
not the world's largest sum of money we've been using
https://paypal.me/ramcq so far - so the money is going to me personally
and I will pay it directly over to the ISP - and I'll use any surplus
for extending the server past the first year.

Thanks all!

Regards,
Rob