- Fosshost is reaching the end of its life and the company urges tenants to back up their data immediately, and migrate elsewhere as soon as possible.
- A volunteer stated that he is trying to reach the CEO, Thomas Markey for six months, who is the only one who has access to the bank and thus to funds.
- While Fosshost is shutting down, a new project is announced, the Radix Project, which aims to provide free-of-charge need-based hosting on request for open-source projects.
Open-source software hosting and cloud computing provider, Fosshost made a public announcement, stating that its services are reaching the end of life. Volunteers of the project stated that they can’t reach the leadership team, including the CEO. According to announcements, Thomas Markey, the CEO is the only person who has access to the bank and funds.
CEO unreachable for six months
Fosshost, providing services to projects like GNOME, Armbian, Debian, and Free Software Foundation Europe, is free of charge. Some of the pages of its website are already started returning not found error messages. The announcement on the website says,
« At this time, Fosshost is deeply sorry to announce we are no longer able to continue offering our services. 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. Because of this, we strongly recommend all Fosshost tenants to backup their data immediately, and migrate elsewhere as soon as possible.
As Fosshost began showing signs of failure, former volunteers and others who care deeply about the sustainability of free software have begun building alternatives; new homes for projects who had previously relied on Fosshost. The Radix Project is committed to providing free-of-charge need-based hosting on request for your FLOSS/open source endeavors.
The Radix Project is one such initiative, founded in part by one of the original architects of Fosshost. »
I'm expecting the BOS datacenter to go offline in the very near future. If you still have data or mission critical processing on AARCH in BOS please take action immediately.
-corwin
— Fosshost (@fosshostorg) December 2, 2022
One of the Fosshost volunteers, named samip5371, published a post that states,
« 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.
Explaination of the DC thing at Github: https://github.com/fosshostorg/fosshost.org/blob/main/src/po… (Other posts can be read from there too.)
Post from three months ago regarding state of affairs: https://github.com/fosshostorg/fosshost.org/blob/main/src/po…
Skyler, one of the last Fosshost volunteers. »
The volunteer also stated that he tried to call the CEO but he has been unresponsive for the past 6 months and didn’t answer. The situation has been going on internally for a really long from when people started to resign in 2021/2022 due to management issues.
On the other hand, Nate Sales, co-founder of Fosshost, and Gianni Rosato announced a new project named the Radix Project. It is sharing similar goals as Fosshost in terms of providing resources for open-source projects. A post that announces the new project can be found on Fosshost’s website, which can be found here. The announcement says,
« Hello everyone! I know I’m not a familiar figure in the community, but I’m Gianni Rosato & I’ve been working with Fosshost’s former co-founder Nate Sales to start a new mission titled the Radix Project with similar goals as Fosshost in terms of providing resources for open source projects. I’ll plug our site now, radixproject.org where you can shoot us an email regarding anything you have questions about. In particular if you are a current Fosshost “tenant,” (by our terms, “partner,”) & you have critical infrastructure hosted by Fosshost, we will communicate with you re: helping out.
There are a million other places to look regarding resignations in terms of Fosshost’s staff, so I’ll state our mission here instead. The Radix Project aims to provide free-of-charge, accessible, tailored hosting for FLOSS & open source projects via a dedicated team that strives to ensure each project’s needs are met. Many open source projects are abandoned due to a lack of resources, and the Radix Project helps remedy this by guaranteeing reliable hosting to our partners who deserve nothing less. In the future, we hope to offer more to FLOSS & open source projects as well as find innovative ways to invigorate the world of open source and spur on digital freedom beyond hosting. »