[RFH] Future direction of the U-Boot project

[neil.armstrong at linaro.org]

Hi Tom,

On 03/06/2025 00:27, Tom Rini wrote:
> 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.

You can count on me for any help, for now for moderation and triage and
I'll be happy to help for the project structure.

Neil

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