Misunderstandings about the Boost Foundation

From: David Sankel (camior_at_[hidden])
Date: 2024-08-13 00:43:42

Hi all, I want to address some misunderstandings surrounding Jon Kalb’s
departure, foundation revenue sources, and boost project initiatives.

First, Jon’s exit from the Boost Foundation was not the result of Jon
committing a code of conduct violation. Out of respect for his privacy, I
don’t want to detail the rationale unless Jon agrees that it should be
public.

Second, Boost Foundation revenue comes from sources beyond C++Now proceeds;
individual donations and corporate matches make up 41% of revenue.

Finally, I’d like to address the idea that the foundation board is
distracted with the conference and pays no attention to the Boost project.
A lot of what we do isn’t visible, so it is understandable how someone
might come to this conclusion. However, here is a sample of Boost
project-specific work we’ve done over the past couple of years:

   -

   Retired an old server that was no longer being used
   -

   Brought on a contractor who provided advice on how to migrate
   Wowbagger’s functionality off of legacy platforms
   -

   Handled outages due to Wowbagger’s hard drive failures
   -

   Addressed a GitHub issue where a large file was exceeding our limits
   -

   Created a discourse.boost.org so the Boost community could experiment
   with a mailing list alternative
   -

   Solicited estimates from CDN vendors when our current sponsor said
   they’d no longer be able to provide free bandwidth
   -

   Held brainstorming sessions on how we could help the Boost project
   better meet its objectives

The fact that foundation work isn’t widely known by others involved in the
Boost Project is a problem. I’d like to find more effective means to
communicate the good work that’s being done.

– David