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+title = "Project plans for a hosted Gitea online service"
+date = "2022-02-16"
+description = "When an organization asks me about Gitea, I would like to direct them to a provider where they can rent an instance and just use it"
+[taxonomies]
+tags = ['hostea', 'gitea', 'free-software', 'free-software-sustainability']
+
+[extra]
+author = 'dachary'
++++
+
+_This post was originally published on [Loïc Dachary's
+blog](https://blog.dachary.org/2022/02/16/project-plans-for-a-hosted-gitea-online-service/)._
+
+---
+
+When an organization asks me about Gitea, I would like to direct them to
+a provider where they can rent an instance and just use it, in the same
+way they can go to https://discourse.org for a forum, or
+https://nextcloud.com for storage. Instead of waiting for that to
+happen, [Aravinth](https://batsense.net/about/) and
+[myself](https://dachary.org/) decided to do something about it, in a
+way that is in line with our shared values: transparency and Free
+Software.
+
+After doing some research we found counter examples that showed the
+pitfalls to avoid. GitLab because its business model heavily relies on
+selling proprietary licenses. CiviCRM because setting it up is complex
+and requires training: users can't figure it out on their own. Gitea
+images provided by Digital Ocean because they do not include security
+upgrades. MySQL configured and run by AWS because of the vendor lock-in
+that makes it impossible to self-host.
+
+We concluded that an online service such as Gitea can be hosted in a
+sustainable way as long as:
+
+-   It is well maintained and upgrades itself
+-   It can be self-hosted
+-   The service can automatically be restored from backups when the
+    underlying resources fail
+
+GitHub and GitLab make it look like there is a market around software
+forges. It is however impossible to figure out if this market exists
+only because it is based on proprietary software. How many of these
+customers would pay for a Free Software hosted Gitea instance?
+
+Even if these customers do exist, a new service provider would have to
+figure out how to convince them to subscribe. The technical development
+of the service can be done within weeks but building a sustainable
+business takes much longer. Again, there were examples of what can go
+wrong, for instance ElasticSearch. After years of work developing a
+successful online service and a customer base, AWS entered the
+competition and started to take it away from them.
+
+The sustainability of the Free Software ecosystem is a new and very
+difficult problem to solve. It is discussed more than it ever was in the
+wake of security breaches originating from widely used and yet abandoned
+library or disillusioned Free Software authors self-sabotaging their
+next release, and everyone has diverging opinions. It falls on each Free
+Software author to spend time to think about their own projects because
+there are no handbook or good examples to follow. That is what Aravinth
+and myself did to find a semblance of clarity and decide how to go about
+this hosted Gitea service idea.
+
+# Sustaining Free Software online services
+
+## More mature online services mean less opportunities to sell services
+
+Ideally the software running an online service is rock solid and bugs
+are so rare that it can run unattended. This is true of
+https://wordpress.org and it is not uncommon for an instance to run for
+years while upgrading themselves to get security patches. The cost of
+maintaining such a service is negligible and hosting companies can offer
+it for free to their customers. They make their profit by renting the
+machines on which the service runs.
+
+When the software is not as mature, it is more expensive to run. Bugs
+need fixing, upgrades require manual intervention, users must be trained
+to overcome the complexity of the user experience, etc. Well known
+examples are Discourse or CiviCRM for which companies sell services to
+overcome these issues.
+
+But when an organization is both the author of the software and the
+provider of paid services to compensate for its lack of maturity, it
+creates a conflict of interest. Should they focus their effort on making
+the software more mature, they would harm a business model that is based
+on this very lack of maturity. For instance, if the author of a software
+also sells training courses, they are not motivated to solve user
+experience issues. If they did, it would lower the need for training
+courses and reduce their income.
+
+## Free Software online services in the wake of the sustainability
+
+crisis
+
+Nowadays all Free Software authors struggle to get enough resources to
+produce a steady stream of releases, even when the project is very
+popular. This sustainability problem is getting more and more attention
+as the number of Free Software projects in use world wide keeps growing.
+Even the simplest online service relies on thousands of Free Software
+projects, each of which needs work to keep going. Accidents caused by
+poorly maintained Free Software projects become more frequent.
+
+This Free Software sustainability crisis is barely emerging and very
+much resembles ecological problems such as climate change. In both cases
+it is very difficult to figure out how to properly care for the
+resources that are consumed. After decades of advocacy, it is generally
+accepted that fossil energy won't last forever but there still is a long
+way to go. It will also take a long time for the Free Software community
+to answer this simple question: how to sustain an ever growing library
+of Free Software?
+
+Luckily, it is relatively simpler to solve that problem for an online
+service because it has users. They can be reminded that their assistance
+is needed to keep the project afloat, for instance by a donation. A
+proposition that would be much more difficult to make for the author of
+a cryptographic library. Convincing users to pay for an online service
+has the best chance of success when the author of the software is also
+the service provider. This is the business model of Discourse and
+Weblate, but it is relatively fragile because nothing stands in the way
+of the competition.
+
+A few years ago ElasticSearch successfully developed an online service
+offering. But when AWS entered the competition and was better at
+marketing it, ElasticSearch quickly realized they would likely go out of
+business. They tried to fight back by [changing their
+license](https://www.elastic.co/blog/licensing-change), which was the
+wrong answer to a real problem. Discourse or Weblate are also likely to
+face competition from hosting companies in the future and they may not
+survive it.
+
+In the end, the durable source of income for a Free Software online
+service is to rent the resources (CPU/RAM/network/disk) it needs to run.
+In other words only hosting companies can make a profit when running
+such an online service. And for that reason they also need to share part
+of the profits to ensure the sustainability of the Free Software service
+their customers need.
+
+# Online services vendor lock-in is cured by Free Software
+
+When hosting companies offer online services they also provide upgrades
+and transparent recovery when the hardware fails. But none of them allow
+the service to be self-hosted. When their price policy change, or when
+the term of services ban users from a given country, migrating the
+service elsewhere it costly and difficult. For instance when AWS runs
+MySQL for their customers, they allow to download the data but not the
+software that runs the proprietary AWS interface used to configure and
+control the server. Another example is GitHub where the content of the
+git repository can be downloaded but the code that runs GitHub itself is
+not Free Software.
+
+If a customer cannot run the same software as their service provider,
+they are locked-in, even if they can download their data. It is a common
+misconception to think that there is no vendor lock-in as long as it is
+possible to download the data in an standard format. Migrating the data
+from one software to another is, more often than not, time consuming and
+costly to a point that it is effectively a blocker. A GitHub salesperson
+would argue that it is possible for people to run GitHub Enterprise on
+their own hardware. But the vendor lock-in is still present via the
+proprietary license contract. The user experience, maintenance and
+upgrades are still exclusively controlled by GitHub.
+
+To guarantee their independence, the customers of an online service need
+to be able to:
+
+-   Download their data
+-   Run the exact same Free Software as their service provider
+-   Run the exact same Free Software infrastructure as code as their
+    service provider
+
+The requirement regarding Free Software infrastructure as code refers
+to, for instance, the AWS control panel and all that is behind it when
+creating a new MySQL service. It includes whatever a competitor would
+need to run the same online service. An example would be
+https://enough.community, an infrastructure as code dedicated to
+creating the services needed by whistleblowers and human rights
+defenders. It consumes resources rented by hosting providers, assembles
+disks and machines, setup monitoring and intrusion detection, installs
+various online services and upgrades them.
+
+The availability of the software that creates the infrastructure is not
+only useful to the competitors of a service provider. It also benefits a
+non-profit that wants to provide (for instance) Wordpress instances to
+its members. Without it they would need to create something from scratch
+using building blocks such as CiviCRM. Even though such building blocks
+exist, this is a significant undertaking and effectively a blocker.
+
+# Federated online services and durability
+
+All self-hosted services are in danger of loosing the data they contain.
+When a Wordpress service is hosted in a home and the machine dies, it
+must be restored from backups... when there are backups. Hosting
+companies ensure the durability of the data with their own backup
+system. It creates a dilemma for people who are looking into self
+hosting: independence is desirable, but is it worth taking the risk of
+data loss?
+
+Federated online services do not suffer from this problem, because they
+can mirror each other. A Gitea instance that is federated with another
+will mirror copies of software projects found on its peers. Should one
+instance be destroyed, mirrored projects can be resurrected from the
+federated instance. Not only is it a practical way to ensure the (rare)
+failure of an entire datacenter, it also helps with the (more frequent)
+destruction of self-hosted machines. Contrary to backups that require
+special attention, the replication involved in federated online service
+is built in and works continuously. There is no need for an extra backup
+service that is very rarely used and therefore likely to fail when
+needed.
+
+Federated services are not yet mainstream and Gitea is one of the rare
+services that started to implement the concept. In the interim,
+customers of an online hosting service will need to worry about backups
+to ensure the durability of their data. But the ultimate solution for
+them won't be the emergence of an ideal backup infrastructure, it will
+be replication (via federated services) that will continuously ensure
+the durability of their data.
+
+# Paths forward
+
+The Gitea project itself, following the footsteps of Discourse or
+Weblate, could provide a hosting service. Part of its current user base
+may become customers and there does not seem to be any blocker to make
+that happen. As with most successful Free Software project, people
+working on Gitea daily are already very busy and cannot engage in such a
+long term project. But Aravinth and myself can, if they will have us.
+
+Another path forward would be to wrap Gitea into a bundle that existing
+hosting companies could easily use to provide such a service to their
+customers. The biggest hosting companies are unlikely to be interested:
+if Digital Ocean was to provide upgrades on top of their existing Gitea
+image, they are more likely to rely on their internal staff to implement
+that from scratch, as proprietary software integrated into their
+existing infrastructure. But smaller hosting companies such as
+https://Octopuce.fr or https://Easter-Eggs.com, who already deploy Gitea
+instances for their customers, would use it if, for instance, it helped
+with the upgrades. They would then kindly be reminded to give back a
+share of their profits in order to sustain the development of the
+service they deploy.
+
+Finally it would also be possible to follow the example of GitLab in the
+early days (before it turned to proprietary software) or Codeberg and
+offer a free shared forge hosting service to build a user base. After a
+few years, a percentage of the user base would convert to being paid
+customers or donors to sustain the activity and part of the income would
+be used to sustain the development of the service.
diff --git a/content/blog/_index.md b/content/blog/_index.md
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+title = "Posts"
+sort_by = "date"
+template = "blog/index.html"
+page_template = "blog/post.html"
+generate_feed = true
+insert_anchor_links = "right"
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