Re: A history of the Boost Foundation

From: Andrey Semashev (andrey.semashev_at_[hidden])
Date: 2024-09-11 22:40:26

On 9/12/24 01:30, Andrzej Krzemienski via Boost wrote:
> 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!

+1