This post was contributed by Andrea Veri from the GNOME Foundation. GNOME has historically hosted its infrastructure on premises. That changed with an AWS Open Source Credits program sponsorship which has allowed our team of two SREs to migrate the majority of the workloads to the cloud and turn the existing OpenShift environment into a fully scalable and fault tolerant one thanks to the infrastructure provided by AWS. By moving to the cloud, we have dramatically reduced the maintenance...
People will bitch and moan and scream about this, but it’s free and Gnome doesn’t have the money to pay for it elsewhere.
It’s a real problem in the FOSS world. Users don’t want to pay, but they’re very happy to demand features or for the devs/organisation to be run in a certain way or for them to spend a shit load on XYZ, in order to be ideologically pure.
This is the real world. Unfortunately given their lack of capital, Gnome needs freebies for this, and AWS was offering.