Re: New Website: State of the review / pending issues

From: Ion Gaztañaga (igaztanaga_at_[hidden])
Date: 2024-03-07 07:32:18

El 06/03/2024 a las 17:37, David Sankel via Boost escribió:
> On Tue, Mar 5, 2024 at 6:43 AM Ion Gaztañaga via Boost <
> boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> 
>> Andrey Semashev via Boost wrote:
>>>> Now the next question is: *What's missing technically so that the new
>>>> website can to live?*
>>>
>>> If you mean switching boost.org to the new website then the IP and
>>> control issue I mentioned is blocking it.
>>
> The IP issue is the logo and, indeed, removing it or replacing it with
> something the Boost Foundation can enforce the copyright of would be
> sufficient.

Hi David,

I'm not sure I follow the issue. I might lack some information, I have 
the impression that past experiences and interactions are deeply 
affecting this new website process. Let me please at least express my 
concerns as a long-time boost contributor.

AFAIK current logo is not owned by the foundation, and we have no 
serious problems with that. Why is an important problem now? IMHO the 
important points wrt the logo are the license and terms of use, we 
should focus on that first. Just like we focused on the 
license/TOU/privacy parts of the proposed website.

In the Boost tradition, decisions are made by developers, not by users, 
Steering Committee, Foundation, or any other organization that 
contributes (CppAlliance, github). The last time the foundation tried to 
make a "Boost decision" it didn't work for this very reason.

If CppAlliance or any other entity tries to interfere it simply won't 
work if developers don't like the idea. If CppAlliance does anything 
that irritates the community, website code will be forked and put in a 
new server if needed or the old website will be resurrected. That's why 
we requested a license change.

> The bigger technical issue is governance/ownership of the server. Putting
> key pieces of infrastructure under control and charity of a single
> individual has worked out very poorly for us in the past. My serious
> concerns about the particular individual are actually besides the point.
> The technical obstacle here is to get some Boost Foundation servers up and
> running with the new site. This will be discussed at the Boost board
> meeting next week.

IMHO, by definition, the ownership of the server is not a technical 
issue, but a governance/trust issue. Boost libraries and tools are 
hosted in Github, and they are certainly more important than the 
website. BSL is what protects us from anyone "owning" anything.

My proposal is to follow the tradition and appoint trusted individuals 
(more than one) in the developer community to have admin access to that 
infrastructure, just like we have trusted individuals on other key 
services (Github, mailing list moderation, review/release managers...).

As I said in previous posts, I'm grateful to all past and present 
members of the Foundation for their time, work, money and effort. But 
with all due respect, the Boost board's mission is not to govern the 
boost project, including the website, but to seek community-driven 
leadership, and I wholeheartedly agree with that.

The developer community can and should decide if the requested actions 
were satisfactory and pointing boost.org to the boost.io server is the 
appropriate/mature/recommendable solution. We have an issues list that 
can be tracked to judge if the new website is serving well. If not, the 
developer community can decide to rollback that decision.

We have requested several changes including license, code hosting, etc. 
to minimize risks and to treat the new proposed website in the boost 
tradition. Until now, folks from C++ Alliance have been responsive to 
community requests. License, repository, TOU and Privacy policies have 
been effectively changed. So I'm optimistic about the process, it's working.

We historically don't request any IP/copyright reassignments (e.g. we 
don't endorse something like FSF's copyright assignment program) because 
we like to honor creators and because BSL plays nice with non-free 
software. Honestly, we should continue along that path.

The best decision for the Boost project is to reach an agreement between 
developers, Foundation and Cpp Alliance, taking into account the 
consensus-building tradition and federated nature of Boost. I hope we 
can solve this discussion soon and then concentrate our efforts in our 
next challenge.

Best,

Ion