Re: A history of the Boost Foundation

From: Andrzej Krzemienski (akrzemi1_at_[hidden])
Date: 2024-09-11 22:30:05

śr., 11 wrz 2024 o 21:23 Zach Laine via Boost <boost_at_[hidden]>
napisał(a):

> Dave Abrahams and Beman Dawes put up the initial money for BoostCon
> (which has since been renamed to C++Now) in 2007 (or maybe 2006?).
> This was something of a risk, since it was not certain how many people
> would show up.  It turns out that the conference covered those costs,
> but they were still personally responsible for the conference if they
> wanted to put it on again the next year, or the year after.  Beman had
> the idea that there should be an independent legal entity for this,
> rather than two individual people.
>
> I forget the exact chronology, but pretty early on in the conference
> history, we ended up with The Boost Steering Committee, under the
> Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC).  That is, we called it "The Boost
> Steering Committee", but there was no such legal entity.  The legal
> entity that represented the BoostCon conference and Boost in general
> was SFC.  In terms of legal entities, "The Boost Project", or "The
> Boost Steering Committee" was just a single division within SFC.  This
> is something they reminded us of from time to time.
>
> At the time, Boost had no real expenses.  The "wowbagger" server that
> we use to host the (now, legacy) website, and on which the releases
> are built, was hosted at Indiana University.  The downloads of the
> build Boost releases were hosted at Sourceforge (I think; anyway,
> wherever it was, it was free).  They later moved to other places,
> ending up finally at JFrog.  They're no longer hosted for free -- see
> below.
>
> BoostCon made more money than it spent for a lot of years.  It
> accumulated some reserves, and people would sometimes ruminate on what
> we might spend all that sweet, sweet cash on.  No large expenditures
> were ever taken on though.
>
> The SFC started very small.  We were project #3 I think (maybe #2?
> something like that).  Over a few years, it took on more and more
> projects, until Boost was one of 20 or 25 SFC projects (again, I don't
> remember the exact numbers). SFC had a small staff then, and probably
> still does.  As they grew, it became increasingly difficult to get
> anything done.  They were overworked and understaffed, so this is not
> some failure on the part of the SFC so much as a logistical
> inevitability.  One problem we had was getting them to pay vendors for
> services used by the conference.  IOW, we would use some service, the
> vendor would send us a bill, and then we would send SFC like a
> thousand emails trying to get them to pay the bill.  It was a
> nightmare to deal with.  Jon Kalb, who was the conference chair at the
> time, asked the Steering Committee if we'd be open to breaking free of
> SFC, and forming our own non-profit organization -- a separate legal
> entity.  Everyone agreed, Jon did a bunch of research and paperwork
> (thanks again, Jon!) and we formed a new 501(c)(3) US corporation
> called The Boost Foundation.  This is why the
> Steering-Committee-under-SFC became the Boost Foundation Board.  This
> is also why the name changed -- we needed a new name for the new legal
> entity.  There was no secret agenda; there was no smoke-filled room.
> There was, however, pragmatism.
>
> Sometime around then -- once more, I don't remember the exact timeline
> -- we started losing all our free stuff.  Someone at Indiana
> University realized that randos (that's us, Boost) were running a
> whole server in their lab, and asked us to remove it.  So then we had
> to pay for hosting wowbagger.  Some time later, the download hosts
> stopped giving away bandwidth for free as well.  No problem, right?
> The conference makes money, Boost now needs money, so let's use the
> conference money for the Boost expenses that now have to be paid.
> (Note that this is something the SC/Board took on as it came up; it
> was not part of the original mission of the SC/Board, because there
> were no significant Boost infrastructure expenses previously.)  The
> problem is that the conference makes less and less every year, due to
> a combination of changes in the way the venue charges (it all went up
> a lot), inflation, the expenses from the covid-cancelled year, etc.
>
> During all this, we kept things running as best we could.  Eventually,
> the downloads became too expensive, and the C++ Alliance offered to
> pay for those.  So now they do.  The Foundation only pays for hosting
> wowbagger right now.
>
> Hopefully that sets the stage.  To me, the important take-away is that
> the Foundation has tried to "keep the lights on" as I like to say,
> without bothering anyone on the list about it.  The Board does more
> than just Boost infrastructure stuff, such as organizing the C++Now
> conference, and more recently, paying the hosting fees for the Beman
> Discourse server.
>
> Sorry this is so long. :)  I may have some of these facts slightly
> wrong.  Like, did BoostCon actually start in 2006?  I couldn't figure
> out definitively which year it was, even though I was there.  But I'm
> much more certain about the major events, and the reasons for things.
> I also left out most of the non-asset-stewardship aspects of the
> Steering Committee/Foundation, since they are mostly not germane to
> the current review.  I nevertheless refer to one such aspect below.
>
> In light of the history above, here are some points I'd like to make
> regarding things I've seen said on this list about the Foundation:
>
> 1) The Board does not impose its will on the developers on this list.
> It does sometimes make recommendations or official "calls" of some
> kind, like saying we should use CMake.  It doesn't actually have the
> ability, as the Boost Foundation Board, to enact such changes.  This
> is not a matter of restraint.  It simply can't make concrete changes;
> only the Boost developers can.  Also, there never has been, and
> doesn't appear to me that there ever will be, any appetite for
> meddling in Boost development, or forcing developers to do things.
>
> 2) The Board is self-selected, in the sense that the Board nominates
> and votes on Board seats.  Multiple Boost authors are on the Board:
> Peter Dimov, Glen Fernades, Jeff Garland, and me.  There are others
> who are only there for the conference business.  There are others, who
> joined more recently, interested only in Beman.
>
> 3) I've read on this list about the desire to "get back" to the Boost
> Steering Committee way of doing things.  This does not make sense.
> There is no difference between the Boost Steering Committee and the
> Boost Foundation, except for the name.  Sure, there is a change in
> membership over time.  That would have happened with or without the
> name change.  Perhaps this is a desire not to have the current Board
> membership?  If so, please get involved.  Asking a volunteer project
> to do things differently, without volunteering to help yourself,
> doesn't usually work out.  Which brings me to:
>
> 4) The Board is a volunteer project, like Boost is.  As such, people
> work mostly on what they care about, and don't really do much for
> things they don't care about.  So when I read, "The Board is not
> communicating enough," I think there are a couple of things to
> consider.  4a) Do we expect volunteers to do the stuff they want to
> work on, and then communicate that they did that to someone else that
> was not working on that same thing?  Do we do that with our Boost
> libraries?  I might communicate changes, including bug fixes, in
> release notes.  I do this because it affects others.  But if I make a
> non-functional change, who do I tell, and why?  Note that, when there
> has been a loss of service, someone has mentioned it on the list right
> away, as far as I know.  Do we also want people to mention when the
> Board took some action that kept a loss of service from happening?
> Moreover, I'm not sure what transparency is lacking, given that: 4b)
> The board publishes minutes of every meeting, and you can come to the
> meetings if you're interested.  Except for occasionally needing to
> handle a sensitive topic that we do not minute due to its sensitivity,
> these are not closed meetings.  For example, our latest Board member
> was asked to join the Board because he kept showing up to these open
> meetings out of his own interest, and would take on tasks from time to
> time. As you all know, this is how pretty much all open
> source/volunteer projects work.  In short, I think if a Boost user
> wants to know the details of how Boost works, they subscribe to the
> Boost mailing list.  If a Boost developer wants to know the details of
> how the Boost Foundation works, they read the minutes and/or come to
> the meetings.
>

Zach,
Thank you for this report. This helps appreciate Boost Steering Committees
/ Boos Foundation efforts.
I am grateful that as a Boost developer, and user, I could benefit from
your work!

Thanks,
&rzej;