Fair question.

What it boils down to is: Become part of the OSS community.

In my experience, there’s no other way, since the alternative is to be automatically part of the Microsoft (or Apple) community.

In other words, you need to make the investment into the implementation. As I’ve said elsewhere, license costs are insignificant.

The community is where you get help, where you find others with the same issues. You can pay the likes of Canonical and Redhat, but I’ve never been impressed by either.

Ultimately any solution requires support, just like any other tool. You just need to make it explicit, rather than assumed.

One thing that Microsoft does to ensure that you have support infrastructure is to continually break backwards compatibility in subtle ways that require you to open your wallet and pay for support.

OSS will likely run for years without adult supervision, but that doesn’t mean it can continue to work without requiring support from time to time. If you don’t prepare for this, you’re going to be very unhappy.

I’m talking about the reality of an organisation digging itself out of the hole created by projects such as described by OP.

I get the call from such organisations to help fix their issues and sometimes I can even help, more often than not it’s a time consuming effort (ie. expensive) to get to a point where the systems are in place to avoid the next catastrophe.

The reason that Microsoft keeps getting mind share and revenue is because there’s so much of that expertise around.

There’s loads of OSS professionals, myself included, but we’re a drop in the ocean by comparison.

In many cases an OSS deployment is the equivalent of “my nephew helped set this up” and it’s not helping the overall picture in the wider community.

If you’re going to deploy OSS, then you must consider the support implications before you start, anything else is unprofessional. License fees are insignificant by comparison.

Here’s three:

• A server with nobody supporting it for 13 years. It had a MySQL database with 743 columns. There was no documentation, served three organisations and hadn’t been backed up for at least 7 years.
• A server running a CMS for a dozen organisations that was running on failing hardware. No idea who built or didn’t support it.
• A server built by an employee 15 years ago, then supported by a “web company” who didn’t update it for 12 years, then “supported” by a Windows shop which was happy to charge the customer but hadn’t actually updated the server.

You’ll notice that I’m being deliberately vague.

All these share the exact scenario that the OP outlines. The organisations involved didn’t know that they were in deep trouble until well after the project instigator departed. No documentation, no updates, no training, handover, nothing beyond a set of credentials.

Right until your PostgreSQL server goes down and you can’t call your IT department and have to start hunting for a contractor, find a budget, get it signed off by management and HR, then on-board the new staff member, that is, after you advertised the position, did job interviews, after first filtering through the 700 … or two, applications, each plausibly generated by a ChatGPT session. Give it something like six months in a big organisation, less in a nimble one.

Does an “entrenched” anything sound “nimble” to you?

And that right there is why Windows is so entrenched.

If you want this for real, adoption of open source, then treat it properly. Consider the business impact of your absence, document the systems, train others, otherwise this is just another timebomb waiting to go off and with it any hope of weakening the Microsoft stranglehold on the company and its C-suite.

I’ve lost count of the number of such “projects” I’ve encountered in my professional career.

This is not doing anyone any favours, least of all yourself.

Given the “deeply entrenched windows” in the company, together with a presumably similarly equipped ICT department, how are you protecting your department and the company against your absence?

In other words, what happens if you get hit by a bus?

Well, unless it came back in the last 25 minutes, it’s working fine in Western Australia.

In Australia:

https://reebelo.com.au/

The open-source alternative to Mailchimp, Brevo, Mailjet, Listmonk, Mailerlite, and Klaviyo, Loop.so, etc.

That’s the first paragraph of the project page.

Not to rain on the parade, but in my experience, having had to email customers in bulk … sending tickets and logistics requirements for large events … I can tell you that self hosting this is a complete and utter waste of time.

You’ll get blocked before the first batch of emails leave your mailer.

Not even paid MailChimp or Campaign Monitor could guarantee delivery.

The problem is not the platform for sending email, it’s the centralised nature of email hosting, much of it is behind Google and Microsoft hosted services.

I’m a software developer with over 40 years experience. Much of it with FOSS.

Your argument in relation to GitHub does not take in the reality of the effort involved with migrating to a different platform, effort that is likely unpaid, has no logistical upside and stalls the development efforts of a project, not to mention breaking every single source code repository link across the wider internet, links that represent publicity and community engagement.

It’s one thing migrating after a service vanishes, it’s an entirely different thing to migrate due to the philosophical differences perceived by the ownership change to Microsoft. In my opinion, chanting FOSS is insufficient as an argument.

I have several projects and clients that use GitHub and while I detest copilot and the enshitification that the new ownership represents, I’m also aware that it’s likely that the sale provides financial security to the continued existence of GitHub.

I think it’s admirable that a project is asking its community if it should stay or move and I wish the developer(s) wrestling with this all the strength and patience in the world to work through it.

I know I’ve struggled with the same considerations and I’m still using GitHub … for now.

Docker is not virtualisation, although it’s a common misconception.

A better way to think of it is a security wrapper around untrusted processes.

You can prove this for yourself by looking at all the processes running in a Docker host while one or more containers are running, you’ll see all the processes listed.

In other words, you don’t need a CPU capable of virtualisation to run Docker.

Use a bash command line:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6250698/how-to-decode-url-encoded-string-in-shell

It’s like “sugar free” and “green”, meaningless unless it’s regulated, policed and prosecuted.

As others have said, the best labelling system we currently have is the licence that’s attached to the software.

Mind you, that in and of itself is not sufficient, since the source code needs to come with it, and arguably the ability to actually compile it, neither of which are guaranteed, again more requirements for policing and prosecution.

Also, when I say policing, I’m not talking about the law enforcement community, I’m talking about developers and end users paying attention and calling out breaches.

Whilst contemplating all that, this costs money, something that is in very short supply within the wider open source software community and what little there is, goes to pay for food and lodging for a very very very small group of developers.

Fix funding and you can have all the stickers in the world, in the meantime, nope.

So, somewhat disappointedly … no.

Tah, I’ve now added my question on Mastodon.

First of all, congratulations.

Second, I have a question.

Based on the link you supplied, SPI is a USA based organisation. How do you expect to protect yourself against the legal lunacy that is currently overrunning the USA?

For example, what if as a member project you are suddenly compelled by a USA court to install a backdoor into your codebase?

It’s easy to ignore such concerns, but governments around the planet are reevaluating their relationship with companies like Microsoft for precisely such reasons, and they have much more money to spend on legal advice than you do.

When I last played with this a decade or so ago, there were several map tiling solutions in the geosciences that are self hosted.

From memory, “World Wind” is a good search term, but there’s others.

I use sshfs.

I’ve had similar “fun” with the character defaults on MySQL, from memory for a time it was Swedish by default, rather than UTF.

I’m guessing that they pasted code from inside Microsoft Word.