Re: salsa.debian.org maintenance (GitLab 11.1.4 upgrade, external storage migration)
On Tue, Aug 14, 2018 at 01:25:22PM +0200, Jonas Meurer wrote:
> [...] free software cloud providers [...]
No such thing.
The whole concept of "cloud provider" is that you have a company which
provides "hardware" or "infrastructure" as a service. This service is
provided "as is"; you wouldn't be able to make any changes to the
service -- and that makes sense, since the service isn't used just by
you, it's used by all users of the same company.
Debian could indeed produce its own generic storage system somewhere,
and use that as a backend for a service that requires a lot of storage,
such as salsa; that would certainly improve the "eat our own dogfood"
ratio somewhat, and could possibly be a good idea. But if we're going to
be using an external cloud provider for such things, then it doesn't
matter whether that external cloud provider runs a free software cloud
implementation or a proprietary one, since we wouldn't have any of the
benefits of the free software implementation anyway. In that background,
it makes much more sense to use free software which can talk to multiple
cloud storage implementations; that gives us the ability to move from
one cloud provider to another by simply copying some data followed by
the flick of a switch (or "just" that flick, if the free software in
question copies the data for you).
It is true that the whole "cloud" thing does have some impact on free
software, and it is indeed also true that this is something that should
be considered when deciding on a strategy; however, it is *not* correct
to assume that a cloud provider which uses free software is in any way
less of a problem in that context than a cloud provider which does not.
Both are cases of you relying on a third party for part of the service
which you provide, and so there is no real difference.
--
Could you people please use IRC like normal people?!?
-- Amaya Rodrigo Sastre, trying to quiet down the buzz in the DebConf 2008
Hacklab
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