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Fosshost Is Shutting Down

fosshost.org

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Re: Fosshost Is Shutting Down

#21

Post by charcircuit »

tdeck wrote: post #6
samip537 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are unable to pay for co-location costs, and that's why our servers will go offline as Thomas our CEO is unreacheable. He only has access to bank and thus to funds. Explaination of the DC thing at Github: https://github.com/fosshostorg/fosshost.org/blob/main/src/po... (Other posts can be read from there too.) Post from three months ago regarding state of affairs: https://github.com/fosshostorg/fosshost.org/blob/ma…

> Thomas our CEO is unreacheable. He only has access to bank and thus to funds. Does your nonprofit have a treasurer? I thought it was a legal requirement for the treasurer to be a different person from the CEO. In that case the treasurer should be able to present something on official letterhead and gain access to the account.

Legally CEOs are not a thing.

Re: Fosshost Is Shutting Down

#22

Post by alyxw »

tdeck wrote: post #6
samip537 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are unable to pay for co-location costs, and that's why our servers will go offline as Thomas our CEO is unreacheable. He only has access to bank and thus to funds. Explaination of the DC thing at Github: https://github.com/fosshostorg/fosshost.org/blob/main/src/po... (Other posts can be read from there too.) Post from three months ago regarding state of affairs: https://github.com/fosshostorg/fosshost.org/blob/ma…

> Thomas our CEO is unreacheable. He only has access to bank and thus to funds. Does your nonprofit have a treasurer? I thought it was a legal requirement for the treasurer to be a different person from the CEO. In that case the treasurer should be able to present something on official letterhead and gain access to the account.

[former fosshost member] We did not (as far as I'm aware) have a treasurer, but did have a volunteer as the CFO. After appointing them, the CEO never fully gave them access to finances and after many requests, eventually just started taking away financial access from everyone else too.

Re: Fosshost Is Shutting Down

#23

Post by samip537 »

charcircuit wrote: post #21
tdeck wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Thomas our CEO is unreacheable. He only has access to bank and thus to funds. Does your nonprofit have a treasurer? I thought it was a legal requirement for the treasurer to be a different person from the CEO. In that case the treasurer should be able to present something on official letterhead and gain access to the account.

Legally CEOs are not a thing.

Officially one of the directors, and there's two of them remaining. Even the other Director doesn't have any access to the bank.

Re: Fosshost Is Shutting Down

#24

Post by marcinzm »

throwawaysleep wrote: post #20
nickelpro wrote: post #12

This is exactly no-name "FOSS" non-profits are a bad choice for community organizing. There's really no reason not to host on industry-standard free hosting, ie Github or Gitlab.

As an outsider, using FOSS in general for anything important seems like a bad choice unless there is a giant tech firm behind it like React with Meta. It is generally so fragile as it depends on so few people.

And commercial software may very well be one intern copying stack overflow to keep the lights on. Until the the day they stop and shutdown the product with no further updates. For example, the issue here isn't FOSS but rather a small corporate non-profit entity. The failure being the corporate governance, finance and management.

Re: Fosshost Is Shutting Down

#25

Post by alyxw »

nickelpro wrote: post #12

This is exactly no-name "FOSS" non-profits are a bad choice for community organizing. There's really no reason not to host on industry-standard free hosting, ie Github or Gitlab.

Fosshost served a niche that Github did not cover. The general audience was people who needed raw compute — e.g. for testing service deployment, or for conducting builds without needing to change how their builds worked.

They also did things like hosting for distro packages, providing domain names for projects that could have benefitted from one, etc.

A big volume of tenants came from underprivileged regions or were in personal situations where they couldn't afford these themselves, and there really isn't an "industry standard" for "I need compute on a budget of $0," at least not previously.

After its launch, the Oracle Free tier provided way more bang for $0, but between their bad habit of (seemingly) randomly firing their customers, and the fact that initial verification requires a credit card, this still wasn't a perfect fix.

Trusting random no-name organizations isn't great, but for many people, there really wasn't a better choice if they weren't able to fulfill their needs themselves.

Re: Fosshost Is Shutting Down

#26

Post by choult »

samip537 wrote: post #19
choult wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He appears to be Head of Operations at a company called Ciptex, operating out of Manchester UK. His most recent LinkedIn activity is from 2 months ago. Perhaps try via their contact info?

Will not help, as they (our CEO) don't seem to want to answer to anything related to Fosshost. Also I cannot be bothered anymore.

Looks like you're a UK CIC, which means you're regulated like a company, and your CEO/Director has statutory responsibilities.

If he is failing to dispense his duties, he could be struck off as a company director in future.

He incorporated a Limited company called Fosshosts Projects Ltd. last year, on his own. It'll be struck off in the next two months due to failure to file.

He also has another company currently in protracted liquidation, and it sounds like he is failing in his responsibilities there too.

The guy either sounds shady, or in a deep mess.

Re: Fosshost Is Shutting Down

#27

Post by alyxw »

XCSme wrote: post #2

I never heard of Fosshost, but based on the name it was supposed to provide free hosting for open-source projects. What was the plan to sustain it?

Pray for the goodwill of DCs and donations, mostly.

Ampere had provided a very generous amount of hardware. Actually putting that hardware into places was a lot of finding DCs willing to support the project.

Re: Fosshost Is Shutting Down

#28

Post by mst »

wrycoder wrote: post #16
dale_glass wrote: post #4

There's a serious lack of useful information here. "Due to circumstances outside of the control of the Fosshost volunteers, we are now in a situation where we cannot guarantee our servers will stay online, and in fact expect them to go offline shortly." and in the link: "I'm expecting the BOS datacenter to go offline in the very near future." And in their Twitter profile, they seem to be a non-profit. I presume then…

There's your problem: "Fosshost Enters Into Long-Term Partnership With Freenode" Last week this not-for-profit hosting provider announced they would be moving their IRC presence to Libera.Chat from Freenode. But the plot twist now is a new announcement made on Tuesday that they have entered into a long-term partnership with Freenode Limited and Andrew Lee. They will be assisting Freenode and are said to be working on…

They pulled out of that pretty rapidly when they realised just what a disaster Andrew Lee was going to be.

Took them a few days to realise their mistake though, so they still got to eat a bunch of reputational fallout anyway.

(source: told them it was a terrible idea beforehand, got contacted back extremely sheepishly when they realised I'd been right)

Re: Fosshost Is Shutting Down

#29

Post by JumpCrisscross »

samip537 wrote: post #19
choult wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He appears to be Head of Operations at a company called Ciptex, operating out of Manchester UK. His most recent LinkedIn activity is from 2 months ago. Perhaps try via their contact info?

Will not help, as they (our CEO) don't seem to want to answer to anything related to Fosshost. Also I cannot be bothered anymore.

> Also I cannot be bothered anymore

What you’ve described sounds eerily like negligent mismanagement, possibly embezzlement. To avoid liability yourself, you may want to put a note into the authorities.

Re: Fosshost Is Shutting Down

#30

Post by mst »

samip537 wrote: post #13
rco8786 wrote: post #3

So curious about the mysterious backstory here. Considering "The Radix Project" appears to be doing the exact same thing that Fosshost is/was.

Yes, but Fosshost's bitfall is that one singular person is the only person with access to critical things, like the bank and thus is the only person able to pay our bills despite having money there or there should be. The Radix Project is trying to learn from our mistakes and do them better so one doesn't face a similar issue due to a singular person having too much control.

Ironic that libera's governance was set up under a similar spirit.

Though frankly if Andrew Lee had ghosted freenode entirely that would've been a vast improvement overr what actually happened.

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