Re: jabber.gnome.org's future

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Mon, 2013-03-04 at 14:59 -0500, Owen Taylor wrote:
> Hi Shaun,
>
> It's certainly recognized that shutting down jabber.gnome.org would
> cause pain for people who are using it. But in the end, system
> administration resources are limited, and we have to balance that
> against the costs to us to provide an open-ended promise to continue
> running the service indefinitely.
>
> With email, we have to have a functioning email server for gnome.org,
> anyways and all we provide on top of that is automated aliases. The
> incremental security and maintenance burden of gnome.org email addresses
> is minimal.
>
> With XMPP, on the other hand, we have a complete service which is
> running *only* to provide XMPP service to on the order of a dozen
> people. I don't think this is a strategic use of our resources.
>
> The only way it would make sense to me is if we had some expectation
> that over time that the number of users would grow to a significant
> fraction of the GNOME membership.

I understand the maintenance burden, and that it's not worthwhile
for only a small handful of users. But it's clear from the thread
that most people didn't even know we have an XMPP server. How many
users would we have if we actually publicized it?

I do think we should push XMPP harder and build more services on
top of it, and having a server for members can help us prototype
stuff like that. But I'm not writing the code or maintaining the
server, so meh...

--
Shaun