LWN: Comments on "Maintainers for desktop "critical infrastructure""

Maintainers for desktop "critical infrastructure"

toyotabedzrock — Sat, 04 Feb 2017 10:37:35 +0000

A tax on the amounts they pay for other things to be fixed/added.

Maintainers for desktop "critical infrastructure"

bkuhn — Sun, 29 Jan 2017 20:43:29 +0000

If you'd like to apply to Conservancy, write to <apply@sfconservancy.org>.

As to your question, 501(c)(3) charities in the USA are able to make grants around the world, and thus can pay developers in virtually any country to carry out work that is within the mission of the project.

Nearly all Conservancy projects are international in scope and we've never had a problem.

It's true you can't simply transfer funds to a non-501(c)(3) entity, but you are allowed to stop taking donations at any point of the project leaves and simply spend remaining funds on valid 501(c)(3) program work.

This is what Conservancy did with jQuery project when they formed the jQuery Foundation, which was a 501(c)(6) and could not accept transfer of assets. Remaining jQuery funds at Conservancy were spent on 501(c)(3)-appropriate activity in the jQuery community.

Maintainers for desktop "critical infrastructure"

pehjota — Fri, 27 Jan 2017 18:33:45 +0000

Just to note, SFLC (Software Freedom Law Center) != Software Freedom Conservancy.

Maintainers for desktop "critical infrastructure"

anselm — Wed, 25 Jan 2017 09:00:36 +0000

By way of comparison, JACK was comparatively simple to get working and did exactly what it promised.

Yes, but JACK and PulseAudio cater to completely different use cases, and therefore comparing the two is essentially comparing a fairly simple apple to a pretty complicated orange. The oft-reviled Lennart Poettering explains this in more detail.

Maintainers for desktop "critical infrastructure"

ajmacleod — Tue, 24 Jan 2017 19:25:13 +0000

The multi-user system setup described is certainly something PulseAudio promised to provide, but I quickly got seriously disillusioned when I actually tried to get it working in real life. Perhaps it was just that I was too early an adopter (this was a few years ago now) but the lack of factually accurate, readable documentation on PulseAudio was utterly atrocious; none of it made any sense and much of it was conflicting. (The alternative at the time, ESD, had some fairly serious drawbacks and couldn't compete on features but at least it was possible for normal people to configure and get working.)

In the end I wiped every vestige of PA from my system; at least single-user sound worked much more efficiently and I was happy to be rid of another layer of useless bloat.

By way of comparison, JACK was comparatively simple to get working and did exactly what it promised.

Maintainers for desktop "critical infrastructure"

njs — Sat, 21 Jan 2017 01:50:44 +0000

> Google won't touch any piece of software with an (L)GPL license (except the kernel).

And now Java.

Maintainers for desktop "critical infrastructure"

zlynx — Thu, 19 Jan 2017 15:41:18 +0000

Most distros don't let multiple users play sound at the same time. Their vision of multiple user is the "Switch User" ability, and they try to set it up so sound, input and GPU devices change ownership to the currently active user.

With some development effort you could fix that. PulseAudio for example, has a system daemon mode. Disable the per-user pulse daemon, use the system level one, fix the socket access permissions, etc, and you could play audio from all users at once.

Maintainers for desktop "critical infrastructure"

cortana — Thu, 19 Jan 2017 15:12:16 +0000

I believe pulseaudio closes the sound device when the session in which it is being run goes inactive (on VT switch). So only the currently active session is able to play sound.

Maintainers for desktop "critical infrastructure"

stqn — Thu, 19 Jan 2017 14:03:00 +0000

This is one reason why a universal basic income (sufficient to live decently) would be awesome.

Maintainers for desktop "critical infrastructure"

paulj — Thu, 19 Jan 2017 13:49:41 +0000

That certainly sounds a possibility. I'd still be concerned about non-depreciating project assets like domain names though.

I guess you could have a dormant UK non-profit (note: not a charity / 501(c)(3)) to just park assets in, and have all the business that can 'turn over' under SFLC. You could share the 'officers' between the EU non-business-conducting holding NPO and the project under a conservancy like SFLC (assuming SFLC thought it acceptable, of course).

Maintainers for desktop "critical infrastructure"

Wol — Thu, 19 Jan 2017 13:42:16 +0000

Our home system is multi-user. We'll typically have three or four people logged in on vt7, vt8 etc. And as soon as the currently active user does something with sound it (often, not always) kills sound from other sessions. Not (always) welcome behaviour.

My system doesn't have PulseAudio - I gather that would give us far more control over what happens.

Cheers,
Wol

Maintainers for desktop "critical infrastructure"

Wol — Thu, 19 Jan 2017 13:38:10 +0000

While it might be a bit of a pain, you set up a European non-profit, get your funding pledges swapped over, and let the US 501 burn itself out.

I don't know exactly the implications, but the setup that US funds can only be transferred within 501(c)s is mirrored somewhat under UK charity law. But setting up a new entity and transferring staff and on-going income across is not an uncommon situation - often for fraud unfortunately leaving the liabilities behind - and shouldn't be that difficult. It's called "doing a Phoenix" or similar. And provided you're open, transparent, and DON'T leave a trail of abandoned liabilities behind you, it's unlikely to cause a problem.

Cheers,
Wol

Maintainers for desktop "critical infrastructure"

paulj — Wed, 18 Jan 2017 16:13:53 +0000

The Software Freedom Conservancy is a great idea. I've had people recommend it to me before.

One issue though is, once entered to it, a project's assets can apparently only ever be transferred to another US 501(c)(3) - I assume a (very reasonable) US IRS requirement. What if a projects' members are all or largely European and wanted later to form a European NPO (e.g., UK) to hold assets instead? It seems like joining the Conservancy now would make it very hard for a project to extricate itself from US tax law later?

Maintainers for desktop "critical infrastructure"

anselm — Mon, 16 Jan 2017 15:10:40 +0000

PulseAudio is pretty critical if you want stuff like an intermittently connected Bluetooth headset, webcam microphone, or TV set with HDMI audio to work out of the box. It can manage these conveniently and do things like hand off audio streams from one of those devices to another in mid-play.

Many people think that that sort of thing ought to work on a desktop system, but if your audio setup is quite static and you are never confronted with the issue in the first place, you can probably get away without PulseAudio.

Maintainers for desktop "critical infrastructure"

Seegras — Mon, 16 Jan 2017 14:25:57 +0000

How critical is pulseaudio exactly? I do have it running sometimes, but I can do most I need just with alsa.

Done

boog — Sat, 14 Jan 2017 00:38:57 +0000

I signed up. I listen to music all the time on my computer...

Maintainers for desktop "critical infrastructure"

raven667 — Fri, 13 Jan 2017 17:24:59 +0000

In a perfect world we would be able to get Google and Canonical on-board with the rest of the community and then would have plenty of resources to keep all the infrastructure well maintained and up to date with modern hardware. Google AudioFlinger vs. community PulseAudio and Google SurfaceFilinger vs. Canonical Mir vs. community Wayland are held apart not only for technical compatibility reasons but mainly due to (L)GPL license avoidance and ownership desires, Google and Canonical want to "own" their respective technologies and not have shared ownership a-la kernel.org Linux.

Maintainers for desktop "critical infrastructure"

amarao — Fri, 13 Jan 2017 14:17:00 +0000

I think Valve, and the rest of the newly-risen linux-gaming industry are those commercial companies with business interest in PA. If I ware their I would crete something like CII for core pieces of desktop infrastructure. Faster wayland/vulkan adoption, PA, pressurizing NVIDIA, thousands of libraries used by almost all current multimedia applications in Linux, etc...

Maintainers for desktop "critical infrastructure"

intgr — Fri, 13 Jan 2017 09:43:46 +0000

> How much sense would it make to share effort there?

There are working ports of PulseAudio to Android, also implementing some Android audio APIs: https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Port...
This is probably outdated by now, but here's a comparison between PulseAudio and AudioFlinger from PA's perspective, which suggests there would be some benefit to Android: https://arunraghavan.net/2012/01/pulseaudio-vs-audiofling...

But the main sticking point appears to be the license. Google won't touch any piece of software with an (L)GPL license (except the kernel). And given the stranglehold Google has on Android development projects, adopting AudioFlinger for Linux desktop would be insane.

Maintainers for desktop "critical infrastructure"

jake — Thu, 12 Jan 2017 14:50:55 +0000

> A link to his patreon link (https://www.patreon.com/tanuk) belongs in the article.

And is. In the last sentence of the first graf, anchored at "help fund PulseAudio maintenance".

thanks,

jake

Maintainers for desktop "critical infrastructure"

tanuk — Thu, 12 Jan 2017 13:57:02 +0000

Yes, maybe it does look kind of bad to ask for much less than a typical software engineer salary. However, the fact is that around $1000 comes the critical point where this becomes sustainable - I don't really need more than that. Thanks for the suggestion anyway, I now added another goal at $4000.

Maintainers for desktop "critical infrastructure"

ehiggs — Thu, 12 Jan 2017 13:55:56 +0000

This is really difficult as packages like leftpad or fart noise apps would be overrepresented versus their effort or actual value.

Maintainers for desktop "critical infrastructure"

mjthayer — Thu, 12 Jan 2017 13:44:08 +0000

Android tablets are looking more and more like desktop systems these days. How much sense would it make to share effort there? I understand (but may be wrong) that enough of that is open source to provide basic critical desktop infrastructure. Though I suspect that it might be hard to reconcile Google's desire to set the direction with other people's.

Maintainers for desktop "critical infrastructure"

IanKelling — Thu, 12 Jan 2017 13:38:37 +0000

Shoutout to https://snowdrift.coop/. Launching soon (tm).

Maintainers for desktop "critical infrastructure"

bkuhn — Thu, 12 Jan 2017 13:32:57 +0000

I encourage projects like this one to join Conservancy or another fiscal sponsor that can help their project raise money which can then be used to fund the developers.

Conservancy has at any time 4-6 developers for various member projects on monthly contract, which are funded via charitable donations. The Patreon model has worked pretty well for artists and musicians, and I hope that Kaskinen can be successful through it, but sometimes the assistance of a professional non-profit fundraiser can make the difference in reaching the level you want.

I agree with Jake that Kaskinen's request is modest, and it's actually much less than the typical contract Conservancy does with member project developers. Most projects with serious name recognition can pretty easily raise that much through a fiscal sponsor. I encourage PulseAudio to apply to Conservancy and other fiscal sponsors (like SPI) to see if it's a good fit!

Maintainers for desktop "critical infrastructure"

IanKelling — Thu, 12 Jan 2017 13:32:08 +0000

A link to his patreon link (https://www.patreon.com/tanuk) belongs in the article. When it got to that part I was wondering why no link... just a blog link? huh?

Maintainers for desktop "critical infrastructure"

aleXXX — Thu, 12 Jan 2017 13:01:13 +0000

I think you should (at least) double your goals there, it will look better (while still very modest), and maybe you'll collect more.

Maintainers for desktop "critical infrastructure"

GoodMirek — Thu, 12 Jan 2017 12:51:12 +0000

Thanks for your effort. I have just subscribed to your project on Patreon.
Fingers crossed!

Maintainers for desktop "critical infrastructure"

bernat — Thu, 12 Jan 2017 10:01:11 +0000

If Patreon could subdivide income to various people, someone could set a Patreon that would divide its income to the various other people based on some "market share". That's quite a reach, but figures from Debian popcon or other similar sources could be used to define the market share. This Patreon would provide a better visibility than invidual ones.

Maintainers for desktop "critical infrastructure"

tanuk — Thu, 12 Jan 2017 02:39:39 +0000

Thanks a lot for this article!

I'd like to correct one bit:

> So far, Kaskinen has attracted 18 patrons who provide $77 per month, which approximately covers his rent according to the Patreon page. His needs are rather modest, as he is looking for $340 per month.

I think my needs are modest, but not quite that modest! Patreon encourages creators to define goals, and I have set three goals: $340 (rent), $590 (rent+food) and $1000 (all basic living expenses). Only the next goal is shown on the default view, so this mistake is understandable, and the description I had set for the goal was easy to misinterpret. I have now updated the goal description, hopefully making this a bit more clear.