The slow death of TuxFamily

TuxFamily is a French free-software-hosting service that has been in operation since 1999. It is a non-profit that accepts "any project released under a free license", whether that is a software license or a free-content license, such as CC-BY-SA. It is also, unfortunately, slowly dying due to hardware failures and lack of interest. For example, the site's download servers are currently offline with no plan to restore them.

A short history

According to a page on the site's wiki, TuxFamily was created by Julien Ducros to host projects for friends. It grew into a more general-purpose platform for free-software projects, and became a non-profit organization ("association loi de 1901") in 2001 to be able to accept donations for hardware. According to that history, by 2004 it provided services to more than 1,000 open-source projects and was "an important actor in the free software development in France".

In January 2004 the site was taken down by attackers, and a number of its administrators decided to quit TuxFamily. The remaining administrators and some new recruits set about rebuilding the service. It returned a year later in January 2005. During that time, the team created Virtual Hosting For Free Software (VHFFS), the software that now runs the site. It manages the services used to provide hosting, including DNS, downloads, mailing lists, version-control hosting, and more. The most recent release listed on its download page is VHFFS 4.6.0, which was published in October 2016. The project has had commits since the 4.6 release but it has not published anything—even security releases—since.

Fading away

The service has had its share of outages over the years, in addition to the lost year from 2004-2005. All of the announcements on its news page going back to July 2022 are about outages and power "hiccups" that have caused service interruptions for days or—in some cases—more than a week.

On December 29, 2024, TuxFamily forum member Thomas Huth observed that repository services had been down for more than a week several times in 2024—including some outages that did not make the news page. He apologized for the "provocative question" but asked "is Tuxfamily slowly fading away?" If so, what could users do to help?

Administrator Xavier Guerrin responded that the observation was correct:

It is fair to say most of the motivation is gone. Absolutely everything got old: people, machines, datacentres, architecture, services. Everything. Well, people are not that old. But they moved to other projects.

And even if there were 10 brilliant engineers with too much time on their hands to take care of TuxFamily, the cold harsh truth is that the relevance of TuxFamily (an old-school mutualised hosting platform with no way to "scale" beyond a few dozen physical machines) in the era of cloud-based computing is negligible.

The trend is clear, Guerrin said, "TuxFamily is currently walking down and into its tomb." The best way to help would be for users to move their projects, and to write about the situation "so other remaining hostees get a list of suggestions". He said that there should have been an email to hostees that it was time to move off the platform, including the alternative platforms they could consider, and what to expect from the platform in terms of services in the future. That communication was discussed "but, for various reasons, not implemented".

Yon Fernández de Retana said that it was sad, but understandable, that the end of the service might be coming soon. They had always had a good experience and "liked what tuxfamily provided more than what other places offer".

Nicolas Pomarède said that all services, except download.tuxfamily.org, appeared to be up at the moment. They asked if would be possible to restore the download service easily.

Guerrin said that it was not possible. The service had been spread across four machines at one time, and those servers had died "here and there" until only one remained. That server, located more than 600 kilometers from any TuxFamily staff, had also died. "Plus, we do not know for sure which part (power supply or motherboard) needs to be changed."

To the lifeboats

TuxFamily may not be the first, second, or third free-software-hosting service that most users think of when considering where to host a project, but it claims to host more than 2,800 projects. If those projects are still relevant, the people in charge should be actively considering new hosting.

There are, of course, many services that provide hosting for open-source and free-software projects—but few that are non-profit in nature and provide privacy-respecting services to any and all free-software projects. It is a shame to lose one. The folks who have run the site for more than 25 years deserve thanks for keeping it alive for this long.