Community Puppet Project Kickoff

The Perforce Town Hall today (see the Perforce take on it and the recording) made it clear that Perforce is not willing to work with the community on acceptable terms. Instead, they offered us a spot in their tightly constrained sandbox which leaves us 1) at the mercy of Perforce IT glacial SLAs to accomplish any administrative tasks, 2) subject to Perforce corporate policies, and 3) completely at the whim of not only current Perforce leadership but any future leadership (turnover, re-org, acquisition, etc) which could shut the project down at any time for any reason.

We reconvened afterwards and determined that a hard fork, while undesirable, is necessary. This page is intended to be a working doc detailing current status and steps remaining to get the project off the ground. As we work through these initial tasks, they'll evolve to meet needs and once we get to a more stable state (such as a project & org name!) they'll move to more traditional project management progress tracking tools.

See https://github.com/OpenPuppetProject/planning/discussions/11 for conversation about setting the proper narrative about what's happening.

1. Choose a name

   Perforce is unwilling to grant us a license to use the wordmark puppet. According to the Linux Foundation, this means that we have to (best effort) scrub every user visible use of the name from the project. This includes paths and binary names, etc. Chime in with your ideas on the relevant thread.

2. Create an org structure

   We need an entity to own the project. See the current research progress.

3. Decide on initial leadership and governance

   We have two stages of organization to do here. First, we need a group of volunteers to "bootstrap" the project and define the second stage. This means if you're interested, but only able to commit to a few months of work then this might be the role for you. Add your name to this list.

   • @cvquesty
   • @binford2k
   • @zipkid
   • @genebean
   • @yakatz
   • ... you?

   Longer term, this group of people is working on a governance structure, initially borrowed from Vox Pupuli. We originally decided that we should keep the two projects separated so that we didn't add too much overhead to Vox's workflow. But over time, it's entirely conceivable that they may grow together.

4. Acquire sources of funding & sponsorship

   This project requires some amount of funding. We need to pay for CI, build, and hosting resources and we should have a security engineer on payroll to handle quick response to CVEs. We currently are running on community hosting from OSL, but don't yet have CI & build pipelines set up. We need people to reach out to eg GitHub for in-kind pipeline sponsorship and other companies for financial sponsorship.

   We do have open offers for financial sponsorship from Betadots, maintenance hours from Overlook InfraTech, and several mirroring offers. These are blocked on a bit of organization work, and then I (@binford2k) will start connecting them so we can receive funds.