[RFH] Future direction of the U-Boot project

[Tom Rini]

Hey all,

Something I've talked about in release emails earlier this year, and
promised a follow-up on but hadn't gotten to yet, was how to manage the
project moving forward. The email I made last week about Simon also I
believe highlighted some of the problems that we as a project and
community face.

As a starting point, I want to thank all of the people (and companies)
that have been working on the project and doing the less visible but
important and expensive things that need doing. DENX has been running
much of the project infrastructure since inception. Currently, all of
the fast AMD64 build machines are from Simon. Linaro has been providing
two of the 3 fast ARM64 build machines (the other is from Simon). Our
patchwork project is on OzLabs group. A number of years ago, Simon
picked up the u-boot.org domain. There's likely other things I'm
unintentionally forgetting here.

So, what are the problems I see and would like to get some help and
guidance in working on resolving? Well, in a lot of ways it all stems
from one root cause. The project was founded on the "BDFL" model,
which was quite common at the time, and a relatively reasonable option
too.

But now? It makes getting resources harder. There are a number of people
working in the background now trying to get things donated to the
project (thank you, again) but I also know historically it's been a
challenge not having some distinct entity for U-Boot. Individual
contributions are best done as "I have a server" or similar. Conferences
are a strictly individual thing.

Then there's the day to day parts of the project. I feel like I
shouldn't complain about taking vacations where I just handle pull
requests and not patchwork stuff too, or only doing a few things on the
weekend. But it also means there's no real way to handle contentious
issues other than what I say goes. Which isn't ideal.

What to do about it? Well, I've talked with the Software Freedom
Conservancy (https://sfconservancy.org/) (SFC) earlier in the year (and
before that, years ago at conferences). There are number of open source
and community focused projects that they provide a legal entity for and
help with administrative things. I've personally been a fan of what they
do, and donated yearly for a long time. I think they would be a good fit
for the project because they do this kind of work for a number of other
big and important and community centric projects. I would encourage
anyone interested to look at their website and look around.

But that is something like step two or step three. The first step is
that I'm hoping some members of the community would like to formalize
helping with the project. SFC can help us with creating some
organizational structure for the project itself, but we need a few
people to do it. And before we even get that far, help with the mailing
list moderation queue and triaging patchwork assignments would be great.

Thanks for reading this, I look forward to finding a sustainable path
forward for the project and the community at large.

-- 
Tom
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