Hey! I'm one of the remaining Fosshost volunteers, and I'm trying to keep the "EOL" site updated with orgs who've offered some sort of solution, like this, for impacted projects. Would you mind if we mentioned the GitLab Open Source program on our site, so more of our former tenants can see?
Pray for the goodwill of DCs and donations, mostly.
Ampere had provided a very generous amount of hardware. Actually putting that hardware into places was a lot of finding DCs willing to support the project.
Fosshost served a niche that Github did not cover. The general audience was people who needed raw compute — e.g. for testing service deployment, or for conducting builds without needing to change how their builds worked.
They also did things like hosting for distro packages, providing domain names for projects that could have benefitted from one, etc.
A big volume of tenants came from underprivileged regions or were in personal situations where they couldn't afford these themselves, and there really isn't an "industry standard" for "I need compute on a budget of $0," at least not previously.
After its launch, the Oracle Free tier provided way more bang for $0, but between their bad habit of (seemingly) randomly firing their customers, and the fact that initial verification requires a credit card, this still wasn't a perfect fix.
Trusting random no-name organizations isn't great, but for many people, there really wasn't a better choice if they weren't able to fulfill their needs themselves.
[former fosshost member] We did not (as far as I'm aware) have a treasurer, but did have a volunteer as the CFO. After appointing them, the CEO never fully gave them access to finances and after many requests, eventually just started taking away financial access from everyone else too.
There should be a legal way for them to gain access to the funds without the cooperation of the CEO. A CIC has specific rules for usage of funds which can be enforced especially if the CEO isn't applying them as they are required to.
You.. you've heard about the whole Libera thing, right? The thing where literally all of existing staff went "We're being legally forced to do the thing. freenode is bad now. we have an alternative available"?
The problem is Freenode was run without any proper legal and management structures in place.
Obviously a lot of its administrators ignored the fact that some admin could simply hock Freenode's domain names to a third party and when Andrew Lee purchases the domains with the intent of profiting from them, they start crying foul.
The blame for the whole debacle lies with Freenode's admins or the people involved in it who should have seen this coming from way off.
It is no different from some venture capitalists trying to profit from the .org domains.
Well, yes; the head of the organisation gave away the domains in exchange for a job. Everyone gets into a tight spot sometime; Freenode wasn't structured to deal with that challenge.
Freenode, the organization, wasn't in a tight spot. The head of Freenode staff at the time, Christel, sold assets to Andrew Lee without disclosing the terms to the rest of the Freenode staffers. Andrew Lee is one of the people who benefited from the MtGox collapse and basically could intimidate people with lawyers until he got his way.
The whole of the Freenode staff, minus Christel, basically saw no option but to walk away knowing the kind of person Andrew Lee is. And now everyone else knows for we can see what he did to Freenode itself when it was entirely in his hands.
Libera is where they walked away towards and it's doing just fine.
For her troubles, Christel is now a CCO at PIA, one of Andrew Lee's former companies.
Freenode wasn't in trouble until Andrew decided it was his.
Slight change, at least in that case the __people__ would have wanted him.
It's more like if Joe Biden somehow appeared with a trillion dollars, bought the Presidency from the former President (Can the President even do that? Probably not, but it happened!) and went "Yeah I own this now." And then add in the rest of your comment and it matches up pretty well.
