29 Aug
2025
29 Aug
'25
8:20 a.m.
Mathieu. Good day.
On Thu, 28 Aug 2025 12:08:25 +0200
Mathieu Pasquet <mathieui(a)mathieui.net> wrote:
Le 28 août 2025 10:21:38 GMT+02:00, Guus der Kinderen
<guus.der.kinderen(a)gmail.com> a écrit :
Yes. This is a solution which would be convenient to me.
Schimon
Moving away from GitHub will take a
not-to-be-underestimated amount
of effort and dedication. A couple of years ago, there was an
experiment with moving away from GitHub to GitLab. Quite some effort
has been put into that, but in the end, it didn't take off. The
remnants are still accessible at https://gitlab.com/xsf
My estimation is that we have less volunteer-resources available
today. As such, I don't see how we would realistically pull off a
migration, let alone start to maintain that new infrastructure. I'm
happy to be proven wrong.
As I am skeptical that this will ever successfully happen, I urge
Board to find a compromise (with regards to Florian's -1 vote) to
let the item under vote pass. Please decouple the effort to improve
the workload in existing processes (which is taxing people that have
been and still are volunteering today) from a migration effort. One
should not need to block the other.
- Guus
On Thu, Aug 28, 2025 at 8:51 AM Ralph Meijer <ralphm(a)ik.nu> wrote:
>
>
> On 28 August 2025 02:35:04 CEST, Elle <
> elle+xmpp-standards(a)weathered-steel.dev> wrote:
> >- The communications platform *is* apolitical. It does not
> >distinguish
> between "bad" things (like enabling C&C systems for malware) and
> "good" things (like rapid triage of pressure sores). So people use
> it for both.
> >
> >We'll just have to agree to disagree here. My point about OMEMO
> >is that
> the UK and a number of other countries have just passed
> legislation that aims to backdoor all E2EE communication
> platforms. Like it or not, refusing to backdoor OMEMO will become
> an explicitly political position, along with its current technical
> and ethical underpinnings.
> >
> >Regardless of its applied usage, the point is like you said for
> >the
> server operators / protocol to be ignorant of the contents of E2EE
> messages. While there may be attacks outside the protocol, the XSF
> is entering into an ethical stance that it will not knowingly
> compromise the security of OMEMO. At least, I hope XSF makes this
> commitment.""
> >
> >The "Four Horseman of the Cryptocalypse" is a classic line of
> >argument,
> I'm sure you're aware, used to strip people of their civil
> liberties/rights, in the name of the "good" guys protecting from
> the "bad" guys.
> >
> >My point is, XSF may be apolitical regarding the usage of the
> >protocol
> (and I really question that), but the choices around
> infrastructure, Code of Conduct, Bylaws, software license, etc are
> all political-social-ethical choices at some level. Maybe not
> primarily, but at some level these choices have implications in
> those realms.
>
> First off, while the XSF is currently the major focus point of
> concerted protocol development for, and promoting the use of,
> XMPP, it is not the end all and be all of all things XMPP. The
> core protocols are defined over at the IETF, and you'll find it
> has a similar approach to try and keep its workings as neutral as
> possible. Also, the protocol *and* the community are intentionally
> distributedly extensible. That means that stuff can, and does,
> happen outside of the XSF.
>
> Second you are correct that nothing is absolute, including views on
> political, social, or ethical topics. My job as a director, and
> chair, is finding the delicate balance between the personal views
> of individuals in the XSF Membership and the XMPP community in
> general, and the stated goals of the XSF. Our mission statement
> (<https://xmpp.org/about/xsf/mission/>) is quite clear on the
> position the XSF takes. We also expanded this in our procedures
> (e.g. <https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0001.html>) and design
> guidelines (<https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0134.html>).
>
> Your concern with regard to OMEMO can be held to all those
> documents, just as I use them to guide my work as a director. Also
> note that we have already been the target of related pressure, and
> will continue to push back.
>
> Again I want to stress that the XMPP community includes people not
> just rooted in FOSS and its varied(!) political leanings, but
> equally from corporations, non-profits, education, government,
> supranational organisations, and military organizations.
>
> This all is why trying to elicit a specific response with the
> casual mentioning of a major geopolitical event is not helpful to
> me, and why I made the general stance on my approach.
>
> --
> ralphm
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>
As someone who sees moving from github as an action that would make
the XSF process more robust, and less dependent on a corporate entity
that I personally consider malignant at best, I believe we could only
shift the process onto another service if:
* someone (or several people) volunteers to migrate the tooling 1:1
to the new platform
* board preemptively accepts that if those conditions are met and no
new blocker is found, process can be moved
* the platform is free to use for our use case, and for contributors
as well
* we have confidence the platform will continue to operate for a long
time (OR/AND it is FOSS software that has several identical offerings
on the web that we can move to effortlessy)
As a middle ground for people who do not want to interact with github
at all, something I can certainly understand, maybe a more reasonable
task for a volunteer would be to build a bridge that replicates the
xep repo and merge requests to allow them to contribute and
-crucially- without giving more work to the editor.
Mathieu