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Fosshost Is Shutting Down

fosshost.org

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Re: Fosshost Is Shutting Down

#131

Post by maxbond »

cornel_io wrote: post #116
maxbond wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the principle of what you're advocating for, but the unfortunate reality is that miscarriages of justice are the norm and not the exception . I'd put forward another principle; it is better to let 1000 guilty parties go free than to condemn 1 innocent party (and "innocent" here should be taken to include people who are committing a "crime" that is normally tolerated, employed as an excuse to arrest someo…

It sounds like you have a deep (and IMO unjustified and motivated by wrong or weirdly interpreted statistics) hatred of law enforcement, probably from either personal experience or political activism. That's your prerogative, of course, but it's a really fringe position and most people would disagree.

Nope, no hatred. Just conclusions I've come to through observation and reflection.

This is something I'm seeing more and more, where people will say "You just have strong feelings on X, so your opinion doesn't matter." And for one, it presumes to know things about the contents of someone else's mind that you don't know, and for another, it's just not a criticism. It's a way to avoid engaging with the substance of someone's ideas.

Basically what this comes down to is saying, "because you have an opinion, you don't get to have an opinion," which is nonsense.

Re: Fosshost Is Shutting Down

#132

Post by vikramkr »

colonwqbang wrote: post #124
vikramkr wrote: post #102

If the approach of the other people at fosshost seems to be that the response to the ceo allegedly potentially embezzling funds/derelicting duty (just walking off with control of the bank account and going dark) is simple to shrug and start a new organization, why should we trust them to operate correctly? I'm not seeing details on what the lessons learned are. If you donated money to fosshost, amd you see the ceo wa…

It doesn't sound like the CEO has necessarily stolen any money, just that he isn't using them to pay the bills and the board hasn't taken any action to fix the problem. This problem can likely be solved by the board simply electing a new authorised signatory from their own ranks. Assuming anyone is still around who wants to take on such a role. The fact that it hasn't happened (?) would suggest that the real problem…

You're right, there's so many ways they could have intervened. It also seems pretty clear that they do want to take on such a role, since they've gone ahead and created another organization that does the same thing. It's so baffling that they seem to think the way to go about it is to give up on regaining control of the organizations funds and start a new one, and expect that people will just trust the new one somehow

Re: Fosshost Is Shutting Down

#133

Post by vikramkr »

samip537 wrote: post #37
tomrod wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to be too probing, but have you reached out to an attorney?

Again I'm not a Director, so not my problem.

It is going to be a problem for the radix project though, since given how close the ties are between that and fosshost there are significant questions about the motivation and competence of the team, and their dedication to protecting donor money/supporting the organizations they host etc. If this happens again, are they just going to abandon everything and walk away again? Why did those volunteers decide that the better way to further their mission was to abandon their old nonprofit as a loss and start a new one instead of taking serious steps to regain control and at the least clearly document all leg routes taken/the reason that they had to give up in the end? It's the same community of people that are being asked to trust substantially the same set of people a second time.

Re: Fosshost Is Shutting Down

#134

Post by phendrenad2 »

maxbond wrote: post #107
phendrenad2 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure? Consider what happens when a CEO is suddenly unable to function. What happens to company property, intellectual property, notes, etc. that are in their possession? Do they magically vanish? Or do you try to recover them? Maybe the CEO's corporate laptop will show up on ebay with files intact. Is that an optimal outcome? What if the person lives alone? At what point is law enforcement a.k.a. "the gubment…

I don't really understand where this comment is coming from, I think you've maybe misinterpreted me; I'm not trying to say there is never an appropriate role for government, I'm saying not to call the cops on Internet strangers, and that accountability you proactively build into the structure of your organization is going to work much better than going through the legal system. But sure, it's okay for law enforcement…

I'm just trying to explain why "don't call the cops on internet strangers" is too hardline of an argument for the real world, because everyone is a bit of an internet stranger.

Re: Fosshost Is Shutting Down

#135

Post by TaylorAlexander »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #94
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My grand theory is that for a lot of reasons we need to restructure society to focus on automating most of the basic tasks required to reproduce society (basic manufacturing of shoes, farming, etc) in a collectively owned and managed way, and then provide the "dividend" of this production for free to everyone as a kind of basic support. Cheap housing, free food and clothes, basic medical care, etc. In such a world, o…

This sounds like a fantastic future, but I have problems imagining it actually working out that way, given how greedy humans can be. I'm not convinced by projections of UBI maybe due to my own lack of imagination. I find it difficult to imagine a world where UBI doesn't create a two-tier system -- pre-nationalization haves and have-nots. Such schemes make me imagine a world where people who built capital and became n…

So to be clear I’m not talking about UBI or nationalization. I agree there’s big problems with that. Nationalization can work well for things like railroads, but I’m talking about something else.

Specifically I’m advocating for an economy comprised of a federation of cooperatives. There would be no nationalized Walmart, instead there would be community owned cooperative stores that achieve economies of scale through voluntary federation with similar stores in neighboring regions, or across even wider areas. Health care could be managed by regional cooperatives, again federated.

An important part would be a culture that avoids buying from businesses outside of this federated arrangement. Traditional businesses controlled by a small board of directors can under pay workers and try to undercut competition, but businesses in the federation would understand the importance of building their own solutions to these problems to prevent control by large entities.

This might work similar to housing in Vienna. There, the city government owns about 50% of all housing units, and this keeps the privately owned housing prices in check. In a federated economy, perhaps 50% of the businesses would be cooperatives, but they would keep workers rights and wages at privately owned businesses in check.

One thing about cooperatives is that workers will have a tendency to want to automate their jobs. For profit businesses are happy to under pay workers and only automate if it makes financial sense. But cooperatives may have more incentive as more automation can mean less work for them personally. Cooperatives also may have less incentive to create artificial demand and low quality products. If they are essentially making products for themselves and people like them, they will appreciate quality products that last longer, reducing waste.

I’m happy you’re working on more solutions to fund F/OSS. Nothing I’m talking about will support developers in the near term. I prefer solutions that make our economy more like F/OSS rather than the other way around, but one is easier to change than the other.

Re: Fosshost Is Shutting Down

#136

Post by pardon_me »

n3storm wrote: post #87
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…

horizontal organization 101: more than one member (if not all) should have access to the bank, mobile,water,light,gas contracts

Horizontal organisation 001: one member should not hold the ownership and voting rights?

The AWOL director has full control...

"Nature of control Ownership of voting rights - 75% or more Right to appoint and remove directors"

Ownership in open orgs is very difficult but this is set up to fail.

Re: Fosshost Is Shutting Down

#137

Post by ohbleek »

cornel_io wrote: post #116
maxbond wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the principle of what you're advocating for, but the unfortunate reality is that miscarriages of justice are the norm and not the exception . I'd put forward another principle; it is better to let 1000 guilty parties go free than to condemn 1 innocent party (and "innocent" here should be taken to include people who are committing a "crime" that is normally tolerated, employed as an excuse to arrest someo…

It sounds like you have a deep (and IMO unjustified and motivated by wrong or weirdly interpreted statistics) hatred of law enforcement, probably from either personal experience or political activism. That's your prerogative, of course, but it's a really fringe position and most people would disagree.

I haven’t seen any hint of “hate” in their comments and their position is anything but fringe. Focusing on having a diverse set of emergency response teams has become mainstream, I’d say it’s a fringe position to think otherwise. Trust in police is very low nationwide and you seem to be out of touch.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/12/us/gallup-poll-police.htm...

Re: Fosshost Is Shutting Down

#138

Post by jlokier »

Havoc wrote: post #120

Bus factor 1 strikes yet again

Not as much as it looks.

It seems there's currently another director who could use the available legal mechanisms to take over from the missing director-CEO but is not doing so, and previously a board that resigned rather than use the available legal mechanisms (which would be easier for a group of them). The organisation is a CIC, which means it is regulated, and has a constitution whereby a non-responsive director-CEO can be removed, and indeed places a duty on the other directors to do so if that's what it takes, which they haven't done.

It is possible that the rest of the board was derelict in their legal duties by resigning if they knew what the consequences would be.

Even if there are no directors left, or only an unresponsive one, the collective owners of the organisation have a right to get together and install a new one, and there are legal mechanisms to do that if there's no director or secretary to do the administration in the usual way.

The keys to the bank account will be provided to the other director or new directors if they show to the bank's satisfaction that they have the right to them.

Re: Fosshost Is Shutting Down

#139

Post by SamWhited »

alyxw wrote: post #74
john_cogs wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitLab Community Relations team member here. Those impacted are welcome to apply to the GitLab for Open Source program: https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/join/

Hey! I'm one of the remaining Fosshost volunteers, and I'm trying to keep the "EOL" site updated with orgs who've offered some sort of solution, like this, for impacted projects. Would you mind if we mentioned the GitLab Open Source program on our site, so more of our former tenants can see?

I don't see this, is there a list somewhere? We're getting a bit desperate to find a host for our project before this goes offline.

Re: Fosshost Is Shutting Down

#140

Post by SamWhited »

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.

Even if this were just static site hosting (it wasn't, but for the sake of argument let's assume it was), GitHub is in no way "the industry-standard" and lots of Open Source projects need something a bit more complete than a place you can put a few HTML files.
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