VoxPupuli was founded in 2014 as a collective of Puppet module, tooling and documentation authors, all working together to ensure continued development on the code we maintain. Today, the community has grown to 218 members and maintains an impressive 335 repositories.
As we enter the new year, we face significant challenges.
Perforce, the owner of Puppet since April 2022, has announced plans to discontinue publicly available binary packages and cease distribution of the software’s source code. In response, our community is intensifying efforts to create a forked project.
This initiative aims to ensure the continued availability of the source code and provide new, accessible binaries for the community.
Have you been involved with projects or organisations relevant to this project before? And if so, can you tell us a bit about your contributions?
several members of Vox Pupuli have over 10 yers experience within the community. Among us are former Puppetlabs employees and current Perforce employees. Additionally, some members are part of the broader community that has developed projects like eduVPN and eduroam, both of which have previously received support from NLnet.
note from NLnet website: Does the project have other funding sources, both past and present? (If you want, you can in addition attach a budget at the bottom of the form)
Vox Pupuli is receiving sponsors in the form of financial aid, or access to infrastructure components.
The budget is available ath this URL: Vox Pupuli Budget.
So far Vox Pupuli received 11,409.01USD in almost two years. The majority was from a one-time contribution from Microsoft, 8,000USD.
And the sponsors are listed here: Vox Pupuli sponsoring, and summarized as follows (alphabetically sorted).
- Babiel Gmbh
- betadots Gmbh
- CERN
- Deubert IT-Solutions
- Docker inc.
- Enterprise Modules B.V.
- GÉANT Vereniging
- GitHub
- Hetzner Cloud Gmbh
- Macarne Limited
- Microsoft
- Puppet
- Xyntion
note: this is optional
There are other communities with a focus on configuration management. For example Ansible, Salt and Chef. None of them were able to establish a big and healthy community with a continuous growth. Some people from those organisation reached out to us in the past and we discussed how successful community leadership works. I think the Vox Pupuli GitHub statistics, and the fact that we're now the upstream for Facter/Puppet/Puppetserver/Puppetdb prooves that Vox Pupuli is a healthy community.
Since a decade we aim to provide fast feedback to our developers. This means that we're trying to provide CI pipelines for the different tools. The goal is that the pipelines provide a good coverage and fast feedback. This requires a significant amount of CPU resources. We get some of this sponsored. But it would help a lot if we could buy more resources.
At the moment Vox Pupuli is a group with 218 people. While this is a big group, all of those people participate in their spare free time. This makes it hard to plan because we don't know how much time people can invest in the near future. With the adoption of Facter/Puppet/Puppetserver/Puppetdb we need to build many new pipelines for packaging those tools. With proper funding we could pay some of our members part-time. This would result in apt/rpm repositories with a secure supply chain for all of our users.
Describe the ecosystem of the project, and how you will engage with relevant actors and promote the outcomes?
Vox Pupuli has different communication channels. For example a mailing list, IRC and slack. This provides different options for people to interact with Vox Pupuli. We use those channels to provide help and guidance for our users. The same channels are used for our "internal" development. So users can get an impression on how Vox Pupuli works and how active it is. We also visit a variety of conferences to talk about Vox Pupuli. There are also different companies that sponsor Vox Pupuli and provide commercial support for our tools.
So far Vox Pupuli received 11,409.01USD in almost two years. The majority was from a one-time contribution from microsoft, 8,000USD.
There are other communities with a focus on configuration management. For example Ansible, Salt and Chef. None of them were able to establish a big and healthy community with a continuous growth. Some people from those organisation reached out to us in the past and we discussed how successful community leadership works. I think the Vox Pupuli GitHub statistics, and the fact that we're now the upstream for Facter/Puppet/Puppetserver/Puppetdb prooves that Vox Pupuli is a healthy community.
Vox Pupuli has different communication channels. For example a mailing list, IRC and slack. This provides different options for people to interact with Vox Pupuli. We use those channels to provide help and guidance for our users. The same channels are used for our "internal" development. So users can get an impression on how Vox Pupuli works and how active it is. We also visit a variety of conferences to talk about Vox Pupuli. There are also different companies that sponsor Vox Pupuli and provide commercial support for our tools.
Since a decade we aim to provide fast feedback to our developers. This means that we're trying to provide CI pipelines for the different tools. The goal is that the pipelines provide a good coverage and fast feedback. This requires a significant amount of CPU resources. We get some of this sponsored. But it would help a lot if we could buy more resources.
At the moment Vox Pupuli is a group with 218 people. While this is a big group, all of those people participate in their spare free time. This makes it hard to plan because we don't know how much time people can invest in the near future. With the adoption of Facter/Puppet/Puppetserver/Puppetdb we need to build many new pipelines for packaging those tools. With proper funding we could pay some of our members part-time. This would result in apt/rpm repositories with a secure supply chain for all of our users.