FOG Project call for engagement
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Dear FOG users and folks,
as most of you know FOG is a community based project and needs people to thrive.
Development has been slowing down a lot over the last year or two as there are not many developers actively working on it. We try to keep up with fixing bugs and make things work with new hardware and Linux versions coming up. But that’s not enough
to push things forward much. For personal reasons I will have even less time to work on FOG and eventually will drop
out all together.There are many different topics to work on: Web UI and services (PHP), installer (BASH scripts), fog-client (.NET C#), FOS kernel and inits (compiler and BASH scripts), documentation, …
So if you enjoy using FOG you might think about joining in or finding people (in your university, business, …) who are keen to work on this project. Please get in touch with us!
Cheers
Sebastian -
Hi,
I would like to help but not have the level and knowledge.
We would like to donate but our University can’t use payment by Paypal to support FOG Project.
Hope fin people to contribuate. -
@Florent Possibly students or other colleagues at your university can engage?
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@sebastian-roth Don’t think it’s letter university.
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I don’t really have anything to contribute, but has the team thought about a paid support model? Being able to pay something to developers may entice some to work on the project.
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@astrugatch The issue is the “team” is built of mostly people helping on their own free time.
There’s not really a way for us to “work full time” on FOG as there’s not enough income received to do such a feat. As such, our “support team” comes from the community as a whole.
Believe me, if I could get paid to program on FOG all day, everyday, I would. Unfortunately that’s not feasible as of currently.
I’m only one person, and with Sebastian, that made 2 developers working mostly to keep things functioning.
While we have a few more developers on titled on the team, the large majority of active Developers was @Sebastian-Roth and myself.
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@tom-elliott Maybe the Paypal donation can be a problem for professional.
Here the payment service can’t pay on Paypal. Need a purchase order. This is why we never donate, if i remember i say this in old forum topic few years ago.
If big customers just donate 1000$ by year, think it will be enough to remunerate 2 developers full time on FOG.
Hope FOG can continue to be the beautiful product we use all days. -
@florent I don’t control the donation system we currently have.
But, what do you consider “big customers”.
I would imagine 12 big customers (so to speak) but that only equates to a total of $12000 (which is not enough for 1 developer (let alone 2).
Plus, if it’s funded solely through “donations”, then a customer can simply not pay for that year. This means there’s no accountability.
I think 12 is a pretty large number, but it isn’t enough to support a full on paid system.
Even in a “good” scenario where we are running on the idea that there is enough donations to support 2 developers in the year, that’s only 2 developers. What of the people who are simply doing troubleshooting?
The point of this thread, I think, is to get more people interested in donating their time. Instead it’s asking us to give more (which is impossible at this point.)
Think about it. @Sebastian-Roth is saying he’s readying to step back and eventually fully away from the project. That leaves me to do the development. Who’s going to step up to do the troubleshooting to those who are “paying” for support? I’m only one person.
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@tom-elliott
Big customers for me is institution or business who can donate this amount to support FOG.
I was thinking a bit more “big customers” who use FOG all days ~100. Maybe I aimed wide.
But you are right it’s just donation, and not bind for all years. -
I understand that as it currently stands that isn’t possible. My recommendation was to see if it was possible to modify the FOG Project’s revenue stream in order to support the project long term.
Other open source projects don’t charge for the product itself, but rather for support, or in the case of something like Zammad for feature requests. Between customers who want to pay for support and customers who want to pay for additional features it might be possible to increase the revenue stream enough to support 1 or 2 full time developers and hopefully additional support person/people.
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I can step up on the installer scripts. That’s where my skills most align. I’ve dabbled in this area a lot already, and have the automated tests around this.
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@wayne-workman said in FOG Project call for engagement:
I can step up on the installer scripts. That’s where my skills most align. I’ve dabbled in this area a lot already, and have the automated tests around this.
Great. Thanks for taking action. Tom just fixed an issue to allow for install on Ubuntu 21.04. Interesting we don’t see any 21.04 in the install reporting yet. At least two have posted in the forums so far. Don’t think there is a pending issue to be fixed right now but it will come I am sure.
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@sebastian-roth said in FOG Project call for engagement:
Interesting we don’t see any 21.04 in the install reporting yet. At least two have posted in the forums so far.
For the exact OSs graph, only the top 20 are shown. I can change it to show more, but the graph bars will start getting really thin.
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@wayne-workman said in FOG Project call for engagement:
For the exact OSs graph, only the top 20 are shown. I can change it to show more, but the graph bars will start getting really thin.
Ah, good to know. I think the top 20 will do.
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@sebastian-roth said in FOG Project call for engagement:
might think about joining in or finding people (in your university, busin
Hello everyone,
Yes, I would like to engage in this project by developing or what else it is necessary for continuing this project.
I will post a message for the community at the college.Thank you and have a good day.
Rodrigo -
I write technical documentation for a living. I can help out with some of the documentation work and am somewhat motivated to document the API.
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@mechalas said in FOG Project call for engagement:
I write technical documentation for a living. I can help out with some of the documentation work and am somewhat motivated to document the API.
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@sebastian-roth I’m not an expert on development, but i’m a multidisciplinary sysadmin, with php knowledges, currently I had made UI changes, system changes, and had on production my own not ended plugin (multihomed location, snapins from webserver, multicast not implemented) (really is based on yours location code), on my little bit big environment, at this moment i think a have time to donate where you think that is needed, I’ll be pleased to make a try, and if it’s convenient and possible make an enrollment… Thanks so much for your great work
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@mechalas More help? Yes Please!
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@sebastian-roth I’ll help whereever I can.
I’m a jack-of-all-trades SysAdmin, can write tutorials/documentation, and do some simple bash scripting.