Danko: Next steps for Gmane

[Posted September 6, 2016 by ris]

LWN previously reported that Gmane creator and maintainer Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen shut down the website and was contemplating shutting down the service entirely. Martin Danko now reports that Gmane has a new maintainer. "I petitioned some of our directors to allow us to offer to take it over and in the end we entered into agreement with Lars to take over Gmane. The assets of Gmane have been placed into a UK company Gmane Ltd. As part of the agreement, we have received the INN spool with all the articles but none of the code that drives the site. We’ve started rebuilding parts of the site just to get it back online, its not perfect and there are pieces missing but we’re working on building all the functionality back into the site." (Thanks to Brian Thomas)

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Posted Sep 6, 2016 19:20 UTC (Tue) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]

Is the data he received enough to keep numbered permlinks (permalink.gmane.org/<group>/<number>) pointing to the correct message?

Danko: Next steps for Gmane

Posted Sep 6, 2016 19:28 UTC (Tue) by Delimiter (guest, #111054) [Link]

Yes, all the links should remain accurate and active.

Danko: Next steps for Gmane

Posted Sep 6, 2016 19:49 UTC (Tue) by warrax (subscriber, #103205) [Link]

+1000

Amazeballs.

Danko: Next steps for Gmane

Posted Sep 6, 2016 20:42 UTC (Tue) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]

Given that you have all the data, if you're looking for collaborators on the web UI, you might consider talking to the public-inbox project (public-inbox.org) about feeding the archives into it.

Danko: Next steps for Gmane

Posted Sep 7, 2016 3:57 UTC (Wed) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

So the two Message-Id lookup services will remain?

http://mid.gmane.org/alpine.BSF.2.00.1004291655110.61392@...
http://news.gmane.org/find-root.php?message_id=alpine.BSF...

Danko: Next steps for Gmane

Posted Sep 7, 2016 23:46 UTC (Wed) by Delimiter (guest, #111054) [Link]

mid.gmane.org is already working
news.gmane.org will work once we transition the nntp gateway off that hostname.

Danko: Next steps for Gmane

Posted Sep 8, 2016 6:02 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

Hmm, the link I posted to mid.gmane.org doesn't work but used to. I guess you are still indexing old data?

Danko: Next steps for Gmane

Posted Sep 6, 2016 19:51 UTC (Tue) by mbunkus (subscriber, #87248) [Link]

This news is most welcome. Even though I've always appreciated Gmane for its excellent threaded interface as well as for the message ID and permalink features I still feel that the old saying that "you never know what you got 'til it's gone" applies to me in this case, too.

Thank you very much for working on this, Martin (and whoever else is participating).

Danko: Next steps for Gmane

Posted Sep 7, 2016 1:15 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Agreed. I hope that the new interface is just as nice to use as the old one (and not some new-fangled JavaScript-laden monstrosity).

Danko: Next steps for Gmane

Posted Sep 6, 2016 20:34 UTC (Tue) by vapier (subscriber, #15768) [Link]

let's hope we get a github (or equiv) project going for the codebase! i love drive by commits/polish.

Danko: Next steps for Gmane

Posted Sep 7, 2016 4:40 UTC (Wed) by fredrik (subscriber, #232) [Link]

This is great news, of course! Thanks to all involved.

There is a bit of context missing both from this lwn article and the blog: Who are the "we" the article refers to? Is it just one person who has formed Gmane Ltd, or is it a group? And if it is a group, who are they, and what if any other group do they originate from?

I also wonder what their plans are for funding and sustainability, both staff wise and financially? And will Gmane Ltd take over maintenance of the news service too, or is the effort limited to only the web services?

Danko: Next steps for Gmane

Posted Sep 7, 2016 5:14 UTC (Wed) by fredrik (subscriber, #232) [Link]

There is a tiny amount of info on the updated gmane about page.

At the end of July 2016, Gmane briefly closed and was acquired by Yomura in mid August. [...] The site uses a variety of technology provided by Yomura's subsidiary Delimiter.http://gmane.org/about/

It still leaves more questions unanswered. Will Gmane remain open? In addition to my previous questions, now I'm concerned that Gmane might not keep operating in the spirit of open access and FLOSS in the future. Instead slowly turning to proprietary products and proprietary source. I hope I'm wrong!

Frankly I was hoping that something like the Internet Archive would have taken over operations of Gmane. A such vital part of the internet should be maintained as a public good.

Danko: Next steps for Gmane

Posted Sep 7, 2016 8:46 UTC (Wed) by juliank (subscriber, #45896) [Link]

The answer is no, it won't *remain* open. It can't remain open, as it never was open. Maybe the new one could be opened.

Danko: Next steps for Gmane

Posted Sep 7, 2016 23:57 UTC (Wed) by Delimiter (guest, #111054) [Link]

> It still leaves more questions unanswered. Will Gmane remain open? In addition to my previous questions, now I'm concerned that Gmane might not keep operating in the spirit of open access and FLOSS in the future. Instead slowly turning to proprietary products and proprietary source. I hope I'm wrong!

Martin and Mark are both advocates of open-source, Martin is developer, Mark a network engineer. They've rebuilt it on Elasticsearch with Python and PHP, they're modernising the backend whilst keeping the frontend the same for now.

It will take time to bring about all the changes needed but I think its in good hands.

> Frankly I was hoping that something like the Internet Archive would have taken over operations of Gmane. A such vital part of the internet should be maintained as a public good.

Internet Archive could archive the text but Gmane as it was and now is, needed a rewrite and some overhaul and on-going TLC.

Danko: Next steps for Gmane

Posted Sep 7, 2016 23:53 UTC (Wed) by Delimiter (guest, #111054) [Link]

The assets of Gmane were acquired from Lars by Yomura Holdings. In turn Yomura placed those assets in a separate legal entity Gmane Ltd. That company is owned by Yomura but is nothing more than an asset holding company.

The operation of Gmane is being broken down into:

Development currently handled by Martin Danko (Yomura) and assisted by Mark Turner (Yomura)
Server management by Delimiter (one of Yomura's hosting companies)

The project is funded by Yomura, Martin is allowed to spend a certain amount of his paid time per week to work and improve the project. He has spent the past few weeks working on this quick rebuild.

Moving forward, the project is funded, its got infrastructure (servers/network/people) and there is momentum behind it to bring about many of the long wanted features.

Gmane Ltd will take over the NNTP service shortly but Martin was overwhelmed with the work to get the website rebuilding and back online. I expect this month that the NNTP service will move.

Martin monitors the comments on the blog http://home.gmane.org/ so if you want to talk to him directly you can message him there.

Danko: Next steps for Gmane

Posted Sep 8, 2016 6:07 UTC (Thu) by fredrik (subscriber, #232) [Link]

Thanks, Delimiter, for the two responses with a bit of formal background of the acquisition.

I'm happy to hear that Martin and Mark are both open source advocates. It would be nice if Martin and Mark introduced themselves a bit more in depth, say on the gmane home page and naturally in the news group gmane.discuss too. No full bio and CV expected, just a friendly hello and who am I. Thanks!

My efforts to search for information about them have come up short, their names are not unique, and I failed to find an obvious presence on FLOSS mailing lists. I'm sure that's just because I don't know what to look for, thus a helping hand here would be appreciated.

Why I ask? Gmane is a essential part of the internet for me, while I mostly lurk, I spend more time than I care to admit following FLOSS discussions using the Gmane nntp interface and slrn. So I'm eager to see a sustainable and open future development of Gmane.

Fredrik Jonson

Danko: Next steps for Gmane

Posted Sep 8, 2016 10:40 UTC (Thu) by fabbo (guest, #63822) [Link]

Yomura does not seem the most transparent of companies: no website, little information on Google, a few worrying reports (e.g. https://skippy.org.uk/yomura-holdings-ifuse-hosting-and-ltt/ ). Admittedly, Delimiter has a website.

Danko: Next steps for Gmane

Posted Sep 8, 2016 11:05 UTC (Thu) by TomH (subscriber, #56149) [Link]

I'm guessing Yomura Associates Ltd (https://opencorporates.com/companies/gb/05781222) is them given that they share a director and registered address with Delimiter Ltd (https://opencorporates.com/companies/gb/07086361) and also share that director with LTT PLC (https://opencorporates.com/companies/gb/04260920) as mentioned in that blog post.

Danko: Next steps for Gmane

Posted Sep 7, 2016 19:43 UTC (Wed) by dw (subscriber, #12017) [Link]

Glad to see this, although I'm set on edge slightly by the use of 'acquired' in one or two places. Hopefully just for use as an awesome advertisement space for the parent company's hosting services, but the cynic in me is unwilling to believe it's ever only for that

Danko: Next steps for Gmane

Posted Sep 8, 2016 21:46 UTC (Thu) by xorgy (guest, #103618) [Link]

Golly, it sure would be swell to have the whole spool available from BitTorrent or IPFS or similar.

CloudFare

Posted Sep 9, 2016 14:15 UTC (Fri) by civodul (subscriber, #58311) [Link]

It's disappointing that the new Gmane is hosted by CloudFare: CloudFare makes it impractical and sometimes impossible to access web sites over Tor, denying users their right to privacy.

CloudFare

Posted Sep 15, 2016 0:43 UTC (Thu) by Delimiter (guest, #111054) [Link]

Tor access has been enabled in Cloudflare.

CloudFare

Posted Sep 15, 2016 14:14 UTC (Thu) by civodul (subscriber, #58311) [Link]

Awesome! Big thanks to everyone working on it.