OBS shut down and next steps

General
9

Let me formulate my point of view regarding OBS and reply to your question regarding the use of it outside the ports. I am going to skip the confusion part, as it has been discussed in other threads.

I develop map applications which tend to have a large number of dependencies. Currently, we are talking about a project with 17 packages. In addition, Flatpak development required 7 packages to be organized in a project. Having it all on OBS makes it simple to follow SFOS releases, allows me to deal with the actual work and not worry much about technical bits that make compilation and packaging happen. Without OBS, I would probably not start working on Flatpak and my maps apps would be way under-developed.

Let’s get to the factors.

  1. Cost. This is hard to judge for me from outside and, as such, we cannot have any idea regarding it unless there are some numbers behind. Would you mind to specify running costs that would break down personnel, hardware maintenance (such as replacing bits), and network traffic cost? I presume you have these numbers and they may reflect your valuation of community using OBS.

  2. Legal. OpenSUSE OBS has the following document: https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Build_Service_application_blacklist . They are in a similar situation where they allow to develop and build on their service while being a company. In contrast to you, they prefer to keep it running and open.

You have voiced your arguments and we still don’t know what is going to happen in terms of alternative solutions. I presume, from a legal point, you want to avoid hosting as well as otherwise the legal benefit goes away. Hence, ports and apps will have to be hosted by someone else, someone who can handle that cost.

Let’s see what you are preparing as solutions outside OBS. As far as I understand, nobody knows technical details yet. One alternative, would be to

  • reconfigure OBS to follow upstream as much as possible. That should reduce the personnel costs through reduction of maintenance.
  • plaster a big warning regarding legal aspects on OBS site, in a prominent place.
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