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 that they're a formal organization of some sort, and should hopefully have some sort of budget and ability to handle contingencies.
So... what's going on? What is the "BOS datacenter"? How is a datacenter suddenly going offline?
Why does a non-profit dedicated to hosting critically depend on a particular datacenter and can't just move to hosting stuff somewhere else?
Why are links from September that might be of help explaining already a 404?
Also, who are these people, and whose projects are hosted there?
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.
You might not want to, but you should put some of that information on your website. Otherwise this is a huge red flag against the "Radix project" you are advertising there. If not for the information in this thread, I would stay the hell away from a project "founded in part by one of the original architects" from the ashes of the one which died suddenly without any explicit reason.
You don't have to put your dirty laundry there, but you should at least mention that the Fosshost leadership moved on, and that it's the other members that are starting Radix.
Yeah it's good to know when the people who actually built and ran stuff are moving on, and the problems are due to poor management (especially by people with zero connection to the new thing).
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.
Can anyone file a complaint for authorities to investigate? It sounds like embezzlement of organizational funds might be a possibility and it warrants whomever oversees non profits in the jurisdiction asking some questions.
It's just as likely they're having a mental health crisis of some sort (in my experience this is generally why people on the Internet go nonresponsive), I'd really encourage people not to call the cops on people in a situation they can't understand or get eyes on. It can make a bad situation much, much worse.
It's even entirely possible for both things to be true, eg, for someone to have a medical crisis in their family, which leads to a series of desperate decisions including misappropriating the funds (I recall a former HN user who did a Kickstarter that ended this way, where they had an issue paying rent and a mental health crisis while they were trying to deliver on their Kickstarter - I don't think they've been active online since, further isolating them from their community and support network). Would law enforcement help that situation? Absolutely not, even if the money was recovered it probably wouldn't be worth it.
I mean no offense to those having a mental health crisis, it happens (I have had one myself), but that also doesn't mean a non profit should have its funds walked off with (regardless of why). I've reported non profits to the IRS in the US when it appeared they might not be entirely above board, and I never felt like I was "calling the cops" in the same way I would where they're going to break down someone's front door; it's asking people who are tasked with oversight to do their job.
Unequivocally, I hope this person gets whatever help they need if they need help, regardless of the outcome of this non profit.
I understand you didn't feel that way, but I think maybe you should do a thought experiment of what "doing their job" would mean? Once those events are set in motion, you can't control how they unfold or predict the outcome; even if that person didn't do the thing you were worried about, law enforcement may well find some reason to antagonize or imprison them.
I'd encourage people not to contact any law enforcement entity of any kind if they don't have a really solid understanding of the situation. Consider this story from a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33626670 where someone called the cops because they were concerned that they saw a child walking alone, and the mother ended up going to jail. That wasn't the intention of the person who called the police; but once you invite law enforcement into someone else's life, you have no idea what they will do and you have no power to recall them. 'pessimizer relayed a similar experience yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33836312
I honestly encourage everyone to consider whether letting it go is the best thing to do in any given situation. Someone might've stolen money? Contacting law enforcement probably won't get it back. An organization is dissolved? We can form it again, with a structure that ensures a higher bus number. These are things we can control, and where we can predict the outcome.
The purpose of reporting crime is not to receive compensation; it's to create a norm where crime is punished and hence deterred. It's a societal benefit not a personal one.
It's not good that miscarriages of justice do happen, but that doesn't change the overall point.
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 someone - each of us commits dozens of these "crimes" regularly, without realizing it). When we reflexively invite law enforcement into other people's lives, when we do not and cannot understand the situation at hand, we are not likely to promote a societal good. We are far more likely to promote a societal ill; that of overpolicing.
I'd encourage people to think of law enforcement as an adversarial entity, constantly trying to do everyone in, who needs your invitation to act. It might be because they need to drive their performance metrics up, it might be because they're overzealous in the pursuit of what they view as justice, we can't really know and it doesn't matter. When you give them that invitation, they will make the absolute most of the opportunity. If you invite that monster into someone else's life - you had better be damn sure that they are a real threat to the community. You don't want to ruin (or perhaps end) someone's life over a miscommunication.
>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 someone - each of us commits dozens of these "crimes" regularly, without realizing it).
I think the ideal solution to this would be to work on fixing the system, not avoiding contact with the system. Hold police accountable for violating people's rights. Remove laws that don't need to be enforced, and consistently enforce ones that do need to be enforced.
>When you give them that invitation, they will make the absolute most of the opportunity.
When my car's window was broken and my work laptop was stolen, I reported it to the police and they didn't seem to do anything besides enter it into a database. I even have the thief's blood, but the police didn't want it.
Having a mental health crisis should not mean that you're free of consequences. It's not like random people are driving up to their house to harass them, they're reporting them to a regulatory body who will investigate themselves and prosecute if needed. And if they are having a mental health crisis, they should be able to plea insanity.
All is this is compounded by the fact that, at least according to another commenter, they're head of operations at another company.
If someone in control of a lot of money with duties to other just vanishes (and according to other commenters, they do have legal duties in the UK), they should face consequences. People didn't donate to Fosshost so one person can disappear and take their money with them.
> It's not like random people are driving up to their house to harass them
When you direct law enforcement to investigate someone, you should anticipate this as a strong possibility.
> And if they are having a mental health crisis, they should be able to plea insanity.
I think the bar for this is much higher than having a mental health crisis, and that even if successful it won't result in you maintaining your liberty but being institutionalized instead of imprisoned. But IANAL and certainly not a UK lawyer (barrister? solicitor?).
> [T]hey should face consequences.
Personally I don't buy the notion of retributive justice. It seems like the volunteers of Fosshost are taking lessons from all of this, and creating a new project with better governance. I think that's a productive and healthy response, and the place where effort should be focused. To me, creating a new, better project to continue the mission, that's what justice is. That's what people donated their money to do, too; to support the mission.
Personally, I plan to donate to their new project. I'm not in a position to contact authorities (as I had no involvement in their last project), but I wouldn't if I could. Everyone makes up their own mind about these things, but I hope anyone considering contacting law enforcement really weighs the potential for harm and what exactly the likelihood of a good outcome is (and what that even means) before acting.
Well, your sentiment is nice and all, but you're effectively dooming every nonprofit to spectacular dissolution if their CEO decides to not answer the phone. Non-profits, you know, those things that are supposed to serve the public good? But I guess public good is on hold if the CEO goes AWOL.
Am I? This group wasn't able to separate the executive function from treasury function (despite their efforts to do so, it seems like this executive simply refused) - isn't that what caused this mess? If you structure an organization such that there is a single executive who cannot be held accountable - then your bus number is 1. Law enforcement cannot improve your bus number. It doesn't matter if your executive steals your money or gets hit by a bus, eventually something is going to happen to them and then your organization won't be able to recover from it.
If this was unclear, I'm not in favor of theft and am in favor of public goods. I'm not advocating for blind trust and am in favor of accountability - to peers in real time, not to law enforcement when the damage is already done.
If you want to know what I think, it's that horizontally organized groups, composed of as few people as possible (accepting redundancy to improve your bus number and allow for vacations and other contingencies), with a narrowly scoped mission, and without accepting more money than is necessary (as too much money leads to mission creep & perverse incentives) are the best way to do almost anything. A pyramid terminating with a single person is probably the worst.
> Law enforcement cannot improve your bus number [...]eventually something is going to happen to them and then your organization won't be able to recover from it.
In this particular instance, the regulators absolutely can. If the CEO is failing to discharge their duties, they will be disposed of as a company officer, and a new officer will be installed, who can get access to bank accounts and other resources (websites, domains, taxes) backed by the force of law. Not going to regulators is what wil lead to an irrevocable failure in this instance, but it appears the volunteers have already resigned to that fate.
I find rather suspect that the CEO registered a private company with a name similar to the non-profit they already run. I don't have full context, but that alone sets off alarm bells for fraud and/or self-dealing: I'd definitely contact oversight on that basis alone, if I had standing.
They may resolve these issues, but that doesn't improve your bus number. There's no guarantee they will, how long it will take, and whether the money will be there; this doesn't address the root problem. If you did all of that and then carried on in the same manner, you'd run into a similar problem eventually.
There's certainly things I find suspicious about this CEOs actions, I won't deny that. I'm still not going to contact law enforcement about strangers on the Internet.
We can certainly create much more effective systems of accountability than having a single point of failure who we threaten with legal action to keep them honest (just splitting up executive and treasury functions is already a huge improvement), and like I mentioned, that doesn't defend us against buses.
I think we can all agree that empirically, this single point of failure plan didn't work.
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.
You’re aware. That bring liability. Unlikely liability. But the only person in litigation or prosecution distance, even if low level, is likely to get bonds. Particularly if someone can show knowledge and inaction, and thus plausible complicity.
Juristriction would add context to your note. Liability differs from place to place.
Personally I'm of the opinion that in most juristrictions volunteers would have no liability, but I am not a lawyer, so if in doubt run the question past a local lawyer.
Plus, who exactly is going to come after you for liability? Liability for what?
> 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.
There should be a legal way for them to gain access to the funds without the cooperation of the CEO. A CIC has specific rules for usage of funds which can be enforced especially if the CEO isn't applying them as they are required to.
I don't know if the whole thing was ever officially documented, so we don't really have a way to gain control to the bank account. There's two directors remaining, and no board to speak of as they have resigned.
All in all, we have tried our best to prevent this, but we cannot anymore.
I don't know what's the motive for the CEO to be unresponsive and I don't want to speculate anything, but it's not at all fun for anyone.
This really highlights why rules for nonprofit governance exist. The CEO could have also run off with donor's money and nobody else in the organization would know.
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 long-term plans around Freenode on the Fosshost network. Additionally, "In the near term, the two projects will partner to launch co/cross branded public and tenant-facing SaaS offerings, available BYOD or levering the combined network for DNS."[0]
Mostly all of the volunteers did not support going into partnership with freenode. Thomas was one of the only ones who wanted it (and he only did it when mostly all of the tech team threatned to quit)
No implication that there wasn't also pushback internally was intended, my apologies for the fact that now I look at it again, my comment can clearly be read that way.
I kept to a generic 'they' because the communications in question were private so while I'm comfortable revealing they existed I felt keeping the description deliberately vague was only fair.
Parent means IP as in Internet Protocol, not Intellectual property. The DNS for gnome.org resolves to 8.43.85.5, which lists Red Hat Inc. as the ISP. Indicating it's unlikely to be hosted by Fosshost.
Oh I see what you mean. Fosshost is unique in that they have a lot of arm64 metal floating around (maybe locked up in a DC soon?). They typically have offered it up for CI or distro build servers.
This is the problem of inherently unsustainable, poorly-governed, amateur operations: they're houses of cards waiting to fall apart.
If someone wants hosting, then pay for real VPS or colo. Electricity, rack space, and cooling are usually the limiting factors rather than data transit.
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.
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.
I'd be quite interested to hear the Radix Projects governance plans to prevent a future single point of failure again. Not being able to contact the bill payer on the last project isn't helplessness, it's a failure of the created organizational structures to have planned redundancy, succession and legal accountability.
Ok, I tried doing this but now its blocking me from posting further. I think since it needs to keep context, jumping back and forth with ls, cd is causing issues.
For my iteration there were 4 videos in the Documents folder, would have been cool to see what they videos were...
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.
> There's really no reason not to host on industry-standard free hosting, ie Github or Gitlab.
Eh, I can understand not wanting to be at Microsoft's mercy. And ideology oriented projects are likely to take issue with hosting on a platform that is not itself open source.
Microsoft at least is the devil you know. It’s like the problems with staying on Musk’s Twitter are known - but some random mastadon server could have a literal who in charge; who could do anything (or disappear as Thomas the CEO seems to have done - check Sodor mayhap).
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?
Yeah, GitHub definitely has its issues. But I can be fairly certain that GitHub's CEO isn't going to suddenly go AWOL and have GitHub lose all funding.
> There's really no reason not to host on industry-standard free hosting, ie Github
GitHub will autoban accounts that post certain content. For example, I had an account for three years, with hundreds of stars across different repos. I pushed an M3U8 file containing content that GitHub didn't like for some reason, boom, account dead. No warning, not even an email with explanation.
Every single issue or comment that I ever posted across three years is now gone.
My account was banned for no explicable reason one day (I have nothing remotely controvercial). They reinstated it after I contacted support they never answered my question "why?", because of course they don't even know why. Some ai black box did it and luckily a human was able to undo it. And even if they did kn9w why, they would probably still not say, under the guise of "we don't want to tell the hackers how to get around it"
Welcome to late early stage advent of the internet.
URLs from tv.apple.com, paramountplus.com, roku.com. Although to be fair, most (all?) of those URLs expire after one hour or so, so its purely to test parsing the playlist files
There is every reason to rent dedicated server / VM and self-host with something like Gitea to prevent big corps from any potential messing with one's account that can happen and is happening for various reasons. Moral / ethic standards might also play a role.
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.
If anything, I think commercial is much riskier to have as a core dependency - they can unilaterally change the deal on you, and if they decide to stop supporting your use case, you’re completely SOL (I’ve had a couple of very close calls with this). With open source, you can keep it running yourself, because you have the source, and you always have the option to patch it.
"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 that they're a formal organization of some sort, and should hopefully have some sort of budget and ability to handle contingencies.
So... what's going on? What is the "BOS datacenter"? How is a datacenter suddenly going offline?
Why does a non-profit dedicated to hosting critically depend on a particular datacenter and can't just move to hosting stuff somewhere else?
Why are links from September that might be of help explaining already a 404?
Also, who are these people, and whose projects are hosted there?
reply