[RFH] Future direction of the U-Boot project

[Philippe Reynes]

Hi Tom,

Le 22/07/2025 à 16:01, Casey Connolly a écrit :
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> 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.
> Hi Tom,
>
> I'd be interested in helping out too!


I know  that I wake up very very late, but if you still need some help, 
I am interested in helping too.


>
> Kind regards,
>
>> Thanks for reading this, I look forward to finding a sustainable path
>> forward for the project and the community at large.
>>
> --
> // Casey (she/her)
>
Regards,

Philippe