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A faster heart for F-Droid

f-droid.org

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Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#161

Post by throwaway2037 »

serf wrote: post #96
fragmede wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you've already done the math, what's the interest on $400k pay for the colo costs?

at a (fairly modest) 3.3 its like 1100/month. I don't know what kind of rates are available to non-profits, but with 400k in hand you can find nicer rates than 3.3 (as of today, at least). that covers quite a few colo possibilities.

USD money market funds from Vanguard pay about 3.7% now. Personally, I would recommend a 50/50 split between a Bloomberg Agg bond ETF and a high-yield bond ETF. You can easily boost that yield by 100bps with a modest increase in risk.

Another thing overlooked in this debate: Data center costs normally increase at the rate of inflation. This is not included in most estimates. That said, I still agree with the broad sentiment here: 400K USD is plenty of money to run a colo server for 10+ years from the risk-free interest rate.

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#162

Post by krautsauer »

calgoo wrote: post #33
kiddico wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think 32GB is going to be enough lol

Also, you would want ECC for something this important.

I seriously wonder if doing the same build twice by two people in two locations wouldn't provide the same benefit and others for less money.

(I might be spoiled by sane reproducible build systems. Maybe F-droid isn't.)

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#163

Post by utopiah »

I think there are quite some misconceptions about F-Droid in the comments :

- you can be your own F-Droid server

In fact it's a basic static HTTP(S) server that is generated with the list of .apk and meta-data so it rely doesn't require much.

I think what is concerning to people is that the most popular INSTANCE of F-Droid, the one that is by default when one downloads the F-Droid CLIENT, is "centralized" but again that's a misconception. It's only popular, it's not really central to F-Droid itself. Adding another repository in the F-Droid parlance is just a simple option of changing or adding a URL to more instances.

That being said if anybody here would like to volunteer to be provider a fallback to the build system to that popular instance, I imagine the F-Droid team would welcome that with open arms.

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#164

Post by edent »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #143

I don't understand why governments haven't started to fund F-Droid, almost all govt. apps are open-source. Countries which fear they could be cut off from the duopoly mobile ecosystem should be forcing android manufacturers to bundle in F-Droid; For the amount of nonsense regulations they force phone manufacturers to adhere to, bundling F-Droid wouldn't be that hard. Google won't be happy, but anti-trust regulations…

What did your local politician say when you wrote to them and suggested it?

(I've worked with several politicians. You'd be surprised what a well timed letter or meeting can achieve.)

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#165

Post by unethical_ban »

Aurornis wrote: post #52
cyberax wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read it a bit differently: you don't need to be a mega-corp with millions of servers to actually make a difference for the better. It really doesn't take much! Also, even 12-year-old hardware is wicked fast.

The issue isn’t the hardware, it’s the fact that it’s hosted somewhere private in conditions they wont name under the control of a single member. Typically colo providers are used for this.

Is it one person? Is it an organization/professional company with close ties to F-Droid? There are a lot of worst-case assumptions in this thread.

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#166

Post by charcircuit »

lucb1e wrote: post #112
charcircuit wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

F Droid is no where near being a critical project holding Android up. The Play Store, and the Play Services themselves are much more critical. Being open source doesn't make you immune from criticism for not following industry standards or being called out for poor security.

If you have nothing to install on your device, what's the point of being able to? For me, f-droid is a cornerstone in the android ecosystem. I could source apks elsewhere but it would be much more of a hassle and not necessarily have automatic updates. iOS would become a lot more attractive to me if Android didn't have the ecosystem that's centered around the open apps that you can find on f-droid

>If you have nothing to install on your device

>I could source apks elsewhere

Do you or do you not have apps you want to install?

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#167

Post by charcircuit »

drnick1 wrote: post #122
charcircuit wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

F Droid is no where near being a critical project holding Android up. The Play Store, and the Play Services themselves are much more critical. Being open source doesn't make you immune from criticism for not following industry standards or being called out for poor security.

> The Play Store, and the Play Services themselves are much more critical. Critical for serving malware and spyware to the masses, yes. GrapheneOS is based on Android and is far better than a Googled Android variant precisely because it is free of Google junk and OEM crapware.

The internet itself is also critical for serving malware and spyware, but that doesn't mean that the internet is garbage. Google invests much more into removing malicous apps from the app store than fdroid does.

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#168

Post by amake »

I publish an app to the App Store, Google Play, and F-Droid. For years, F-Droid took absolute ages to reflect a new release.

People used to criticize the walled gardens for having capricious reviewers and slow review times, but I found F-Droid much more frustrating to get approval from and much slower to get a release out.

So this development is much appreciated. In fact I had an inkling that build times had improved recently when an update made it out to F-Droid in only a day or two.

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#170

Post by [deleted] »

Aurornis wrote: post #50
lrvick wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

400K would go -fast- if they stuck to a traditional colo setup. Donations like this are rare and it may be all they get for a decade. Personally I would feel better about round robin across multiple maintainer-home-hosted machines.

> 400K would go -fast- if they stuck to a traditional colo setup. I don’t know where you’re pricing coloration, but I could host a single server indefinitely from the interest alone on $400K at the (very nice) data centers I’ve used. Collocation is not that expensive. I’m not understanding how you think $400K would disappear “fast” unless you think it’s thousands of dollars per month?

[deleted]
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