Minutes of the Solidary Administrative Council meeting of 2026-02-10 Present: Andreas Enge, Fredrik Salomonsson, Jelle Licht, Simon Tournier, Steve George, Tanguy Le Carrour 1) Assign €1500 of budget to support Codeberg infrastructure GNU Guix has a critical dependency on Codeberg for both development infrastructure and user-facing package information. For development infrastructure we depend on Codeberg for Git hosting and issue management. All Guix users download their copy of the package archive from the Codeberg repository. The impact is that Codeberg can be considered our _most_ critical dependency, an even higher priority than the build servers. The Codeberg site is run by Codeberg e.V which is a registered non-profit Association based in Berlin, Germany. The Association is funded by it's members. A recent blog post [0] says there are 1200 members, with 61 corporations, 415 supporting members and 786 standard members. There isn't a publicly available budget, but from looking through their issue list and blog posts it isn't that extensive. They have one full-time employee doing technical work, a part-time admin person, and are paying for contracting work to develop Forgejo. In the recent blog post they announced there are now 300,000 repositories across 3 servers. They've started to add resilience to their infrastructure, but it's certainly small compared to other commercial services. The proposal is that Guix Foundation will support Codeberg e.V by becoming a member of the association. This would be a financial contribution towards the costs GNU Guix puts onto the Codeberg infrastructure, as well as supporting the development of Codeberg and Forgejo. As a corporate entity Guix Foundation can join as a 'Supporting Member' [1], which means that we can speak at their Assembly but have no voting rights [2]. An individual person can join as an 'Active member' where they have "active and passive election rights as well as the right to submit requests, vote and speak at general assemblies". The downside of this structure is that Guix Foundation is not able to represent it's members interests in votes as a Supporting Member. One way to mitigate this would be for some members of the SAC to join Codeberg e.V with the intention of representing Guix Foundations interests. We would join as follows: 1. Guix Foundation becomes a 'Supporting Member' 2. Guix Foundation pays for N members of the SAC to join as 'Active Members' with the intention that they represent our members interests I emailed Codeberg e.V. and they replied saying they don't think there's a problem with this approach. Appropriate level of support ----------------------------- One of the problems of 'free' services with a donation model is determining what is an appropriate level of support. It's common for people to assume that services are far cheaper to develop and maintain than they actually are. This has led to various free and libre services closing down as they were chronically under-funded. We can look at this in two ways: * What would Guix pay to an equivalent commercial service? * What can Guix Foundation afford? For the equivalent service I looked at GitHub, GitLab and SourceHut. GitHub SaaS has a Team and Enterprise subscription level [3]. The 'Team' level provides the features that Guix uses like Code owners, Wiki/Pages and so forth. The pricing is 48 USD (41 EUR) per team member a year, as Guix has 61 members that would be €2928 a year. GitLab is another possibility, but from what I can find [4] their entry level ('Premium') is 348 USD per user a year so it's not even worth pricing that up! Finally, SourceHut [5] charges based on the user's personal situation there are three levels amateur, typical and professional. The typical hacker is €60 a year, their amateur hacker is €24 a year. From this I conclude that if Guix had to pay for an equivalent service it would pay somewhere between €24-41 per person a year, this would be between €1464 and €2928 annually. The second way to look at this is what can Guix Foundation afford. The fundraising campaign looks like it will achieve a sustainable budget level of between €15-20k a year [6]. Given that Codeberg is the most critical dependency we have for the Guix development team I would like to assign up to 10% of our budget to it. This which would mean an estimated annual contribution of 1,500 EUR which is just within the level that the market price assessment shows. Since we're still dealing in estimates and not actual cash in our bank account I would like to split it into two transactions so that there's no risk to our cash position. Therefore, it would look something like this: 1. 1-6 months - €750 - Guix Foundation becomes a 'Supporting Member': €500 - SAC members x 5: €250 2. 7-12 months - €750 - Additional donation - https://donate.codeberg.org/ Please vote 'yes' to authorise assigning this budget and delegating authority to Tanguy/I to take action on that basis. This will allow us to deal with becoming members and making payments to Codeberg e.V up to this level over the next 12 months. [0] https://blog.codeberg.org/letter-from-codeberg-onwards-and-upwards.html, assuming they charged the 61 corporations €100 each, and the remaining 1140 €24 each, then their budget is around €33460 per year. But I don't know at the moment. [1] https://join.codeberg.org/ [2] German https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/src/branch/main/Satzung.md and English https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/src/branch/main/en/bylaws.md [3] https://github.com/pricing [4] https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/ [5] https://sourcehut.org/pricing/ [6] https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2025/update-on-the-guix-fundraising/ on the 1st Nov we'd received 6500 EUR. Looking at the recurring subscriptions we can estimate an MRR of 1600 EUR. If we think we can safely estimate that annually we'll be able to achieve 15k, and hopefully closer to 20k.. This proposal has been accepted unanimously.