Re: Q2 2024 Transparency Report on Boost C++ Library

From: Boris Kolpackov (boris_at_[hidden])
Date: 2024-07-20 07:39:12

Phil Endecott via Boost <boost_at_[hidden]> writes:

> Louis Tatta wrote:
>
> > Server Hosting $23,000 [per quarter]
> 
> That's a lot of money.

Indeed. For perspective, for $7K/month you could rent about 45 Xeon
Gold 24-core servers on Hetzner. So over 1000 cores of compute or about
7 dedicated cores per Boost library. Imagine the CI system you could
build from that.

(I appreciate that managing those 45 servers will cost something,
potentially even more than the servers themselves. Still, for something
like CI which doesn't have strict reliability/availability requirements,
a lot of this management cost can be pushed upfront and made fixed.)

 
> It's really none of my business how you spend your money, [...]

I had a related question for while now so while at it, let me ask it:
Where does this money come from and how long will it last? I looked
around the C++ Alliance website for the answer but all I could find
was that "The Alliance is currently funded by a private endowment".

Are you (as in, Boost developers) not concerned where this non-trivial
amounts of money come from? Equally important, are you not concerned
about what happens if/when it runs out? For example, there seem to
be multiple, full-time developers working on the new Boost website.
Based on that I think it's reasonable to assume that the result will
require a non-trivial amount of ongoing maintenance. What happens
when/if there is no more funding for this maintenance? Are the Boost
developers prepared to step in and do web development?

I realize am asking pointed questions while not really being part
of the project (other than packaging Boost for build2), so if the
answer is "this is none of your business", then that's fair enough.