The Foresight Linux Project shuts down

[Posted May 12, 2015 by corbet]

From:		"Michael K. Johnson" <johnsonm-XcoBkNhltcHYtjvyW6yDsg-AT-public.gmane.org>
To:		<foresight-devel-RyYwo1q5J+qJ4JLcm61w83viChZXdy27-AT-public.gmane.org>, <foresight-distro-RyYwo1q5J+qJ4JLcm61w83viChZXdy27-AT-public.gmane.org>
Subject:		Foresight Linux Project announces its retirement
Date:		Mon, 11 May 2015 20:32:44 -0400
Message-ID:		<20150512003244.GA673@people.danlj.org>
Cc:		<foresight-council-RyYwo1q5J+qJ4JLcm61w83viChZXdy27-AT-public.gmane.org>
Archive‑link:		Article

The Foresight Linux Council has determined that there has
been insufficient volunteer activity to sustain meaningful new
development of Foresight Linux. Faced with the need either to
update the project's physical infrastructure or cease operations,
we find no compelling reason to update the infrastructure.

Therefore, around the end of May, the following will be shut down:
* Software repositories (Foresight Linux and legacy rBuilder Online
  repositories)
* JIRA and Confluence servers
* Shared development infrastructure
* Mailing lists, including these lists

The foresightlinux.org domain will remain as an informal "alumni
association" for an indefinite amount of time, along with the
project IRC channels for as long as they are in use.

Volunteers to host read-only copies of the JIRA/Confluence
and/or mailing list archives should respond to
foresight-devel-RyYwo1q5J+qJ4JLcm61w83viChZXdy27@public.gmane.org in the next few days,
while the lists are still operational.

Hosting the repositories in read-only mode would be non-trivial;
requiring approximately 2.5TB of storage; simply moving the data
would be a substantial task. Do not assume that the repository
contents will be retained.

The Foresight Linux Council would like to extend our thanks to the
Software Freedom Conservancy, our corporate home, for their support
of Foresight Linux and of software freedom generally. We would also
like to thank SAS Institute for providing physical infrastructure and
hosting for the past two and a half years, as well as for offering
to refresh the infrastructure. This decision to retire Foresight
Linux was entirely the council's.

To those of us who have been a part of this community for up
to ten years, this feels a little like a death. If you wish to
celebrate the life of this project, please discuss soon on the
foresight-devel-RyYwo1q5J+qJ4JLcm61w83viChZXdy27@public.gmane.org list or on IRC on the
freenode.net #foresight-devel channel when and how to do so.

On behalf of the Foresight Linux Council,

Michael K Johnson

The Foresight Linux Project shuts down

Posted May 12, 2015 14:48 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (7 responses)

Is that it for everything built using rPath and rBuilder? A shame, they were a very nice system, but it looks like SAS has eaten the whole thing alive and left nothing behind.

The Foresight Linux Project shuts down

Posted May 12, 2015 17:35 UTC (Tue) by michaelkjohnson (subscriber, #41438) [Link] (4 responses)

SAS wasn't building Foresight, just hosting it. SAS has released as open source more of the rPath-sourced components than rPath did, and continues to push updates -- see https://github.com/stars/conarysync for the rPath-related repositories to which SAS continues to contribute.

I'll repeat what I said in the announcement: SAS was continuing this support for Foresight; it was the Foresight council who saw that the time had come to acknowledge the current state of volunteerism within the project.

Regarding "eaten the whole thing alive", that's a rather unfortunate characterization of continuing to invest in the technology and release it as open source, and purposely doing so under the terms of the liberal Apache 2 license so that there would be more possibility of the components being useful elsewhere as well as together. Not really sure what alternative you would be proposing.

The Foresight Linux Project shuts down

Posted May 12, 2015 17:44 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

If anyone wants to host the wiki content but not bind themselves to Confluence, it should be possible to convert it to MoinMoin as was done for the Mailman project fairly recently.

The Foresight Linux Project shuts down

Posted May 19, 2015 19:08 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

Well it clearly hasn't eaten the *whole* thing alive, since you're still here :) I'm just being a lefty unhappy at the way that almost every neat idea out there gets eaten by megacorps and has all the life crushed out of it shortly afterwards.

The Foresight Linux Project shuts down

Posted May 28, 2015 1:30 UTC (Thu) by michaelkjohnson (subscriber, #41438) [Link]

In this case the life was crushed out of it already, and SAS stepped in and kept the technology going.

rBuilder Open Source

Posted Jul 14, 2015 15:24 UTC (Tue) by michaelkjohnson (subscriber, #41438) [Link]

Some months ago, SAS started working on releasing rBuilder as Open Source. But the work wasn't done yet when Foresight shut down...

I'm delighted to say that the whole thing is now available, including introductory docs with a downloadable image (referenced from the docs), and a google group to discuss.

The Foresight Linux Project shuts down

Posted May 12, 2015 22:03 UTC (Tue) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] (1 responses)

I do not see where SAS has anything to do with this from this post or any other point. Do you have evidence about this that you can point to?

The Foresight Linux Project shuts down

Posted May 13, 2015 9:50 UTC (Wed) by Mark__T (guest, #101838) [Link]

SAS has nothing to do with it. It's only our lack of time we can dedicate to keep it going. We didn't do updates to our current version for quite some time.

The Foresight Linux Project shuts down

Posted May 12, 2015 17:49 UTC (Tue) by branden (guest, #7029) [Link] (4 responses)

You'd think they would have seen this coming...

The Foresight Linux Project shuts down

Posted May 13, 2015 7:08 UTC (Wed) by ledow (guest, #11753) [Link] (3 responses)

Da-dum, tish.

According to my end, the foresightlinux.org site is already dead. Someone didn't pay the DreamHost bill.

But the only reason I was going there anyway was to find out what the hell the project was. I'd never heard of it and couldn't tell from all the above babble what it actually did (or did different to others).

No wonder they had problems getting people involved, they were pretty much under my radar for their entire existence.

The Foresight Linux Project shuts down

Posted May 13, 2015 9:01 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (2 responses)

The main site appears to give the hosting provider "missing site" page, even for entries on archive.org for this year, but wiki.foresightlinux.org does point to the Confluence site. Then again, the DNS entry for that could well be pointing to Atlassian or their appointed hosting company.

The Foresight Linux Project shuts down

Posted May 18, 2015 2:05 UTC (Mon) by michaelkjohnson (subscriber, #41438) [Link] (1 responses)

The volunteer hosting the main page content stepped down, and no one replaced him. An example of the reality that the council saw.

It happens (not that it's important) that I'm currently hosting the Confluence and JIRA instances. It's not that they have to go away at a particular instant, but as the project shuts down, it's hard to think that it's worth the time to keep up with security updates and JIRA/Confluence changes indefinitely.

The Foresight Linux Project shuts down

Posted May 18, 2015 10:49 UTC (Mon) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

Well, as I pointed out elsewhere, if there's any interest in maintaining the Confluence content outside Confluence, there's a converter for MoinMoin that I developed to migrate GNU Mailman's wiki. It isn't perfect, but then again, the conversion between markup formats that Atlassian did when they apparently decided to "upgrade" everyone (between versions 3 and 4, I think) didn't produce uniformly great results, either, and they obviously have a few advantages over outsiders reading the public Confluence documentation.

The thread on the referenced mailing list seemed to be rather sad - people saying their goodbyes, even - and so there might not be much interest at the moment, and as someone who never used this product, I'm not personally clamouring to work with this content in other forms, but there are reasonably palatable options for those who want to keep the content around even if it's just for historical reference.