Re: [RFH] Future direction of the U-Boot project

[Mattijs Korpershoek <mkorpershoek@kernel.org>]

Hi Tom,

On Mon, Jun 02, 2025 at 16:27, Tom Rini <trini@konsulko.com> wrote:

> Hey all,
>
> Something I've talked about in release emails earlier this year, and
> promised a follow-up on but hadn't gotten to yet, was how to manage the
> project moving forward. The email I made last week about Simon also I
> believe highlighted some of the problems that we as a project and
> community face.
>
> As a starting point, I want to thank all of the people (and companies)
> that have been working on the project and doing the less visible but
> important and expensive things that need doing. DENX has been running
> much of the project infrastructure since inception. Currently, all of
> the fast AMD64 build machines are from Simon. Linaro has been providing
> two of the 3 fast ARM64 build machines (the other is from Simon). Our
> patchwork project is on OzLabs group. A number of years ago, Simon
> picked up the u-boot.org domain. There's likely other things I'm
> unintentionally forgetting here.
>
> So, what are the problems I see and would like to get some help and
> guidance in working on resolving? Well, in a lot of ways it all stems
> from one root cause. The project was founded on the "BDFL" model,
> which was quite common at the time, and a relatively reasonable option
> too.
>
> But now? It makes getting resources harder. There are a number of people
> working in the background now trying to get things donated to the
> project (thank you, again) but I also know historically it's been a
> challenge not having some distinct entity for U-Boot. Individual
> contributions are best done as "I have a server" or similar. Conferences
> are a strictly individual thing.
>
> Then there's the day to day parts of the project. I feel like I
> shouldn't complain about taking vacations where I just handle pull
> requests and not patchwork stuff too, or only doing a few things on the
> weekend. But it also means there's no real way to handle contentious
> issues other than what I say goes. Which isn't ideal.
>
> What to do about it? Well, I've talked with the Software Freedom
> Conservancy (https://sfconservancy.org/) (SFC) earlier in the year (and
> before that, years ago at conferences). There are number of open source
> and community focused projects that they provide a legal entity for and
> help with administrative things. I've personally been a fan of what they
> do, and donated yearly for a long time. I think they would be a good fit
> for the project because they do this kind of work for a number of other
> big and important and community centric projects. I would encourage
> anyone interested to look at their website and look around.
>
> But that is something like step two or step three. The first step is
> that I'm hoping some members of the community would like to formalize
> helping with the project. SFC can help us with creating some
> organizational structure for the project itself, but we need a few
> people to do it. And before we even get that far, help with the mailing
> list moderation queue and triaging patchwork assignments would be great.

I'm happy to help with the mailing list moderation queue. I'm in Europe
timezone.
I will be away for 2 months (August-Sept). Please reach out to me if you
think I can help.

>
> Thanks for reading this, I look forward to finding a sustainable path
> forward for the project and the community at large.
>
> -- 
> Tom