Dear Colleagues and Linuxaudio.org Consortium Stakeholders,
It's been a long time since we used these lists to communicate and
coordinate the Linuxaudio.org consortium. This was in part because the
community has experienced a steady growth both in terms of resources and
their support through Virginia Tech. Since the server was migrated to
Virginia Tech almost 12 years ago, the server traffic and its services
increased by several orders of magnitude. In 2006 we had only a couple
of vhosts with thousands of monthly hits and minimal bandwidth. In
contrast, by January 2018 those numbers grew to over 10TB of monthly
traffic with over 7 million hits spread across 40 vhosts.
As you may be by now aware, the server was severely compromised at the
end of January which warranted complete reconstruction. It appears one
of the community members' SHA keys were stolen and used to access the
terminal upon which the hacker exploited a bug in kernel to gain root
access. The good news all the data was safely backed up and recovered.
This hack was made possible in good part due to understaffed nature of
server admins. As a result a decision was made to migrate server, thanks
in good part to the hard work of Jeremy Jongepier, to the cyso.net
servers in Europe where it is anticipated to have a more regular support.
After almost 2 weeks of downtime, the end result are better hosting and
more bandwidth for the community. This, however, also marks an important
milestone in this essential community resource. Namely, I believe it is
time to once again mobilize the management group and to establish an
advisory board or a steering committee that will help steer the
consortium and jointly explore ways to provide better and more
consistent support, ensure we offer up-to-date information, to grow the
resources, their visibility, and footprint, as well as consider
establishing a foundation that may help facilitate and support critical
programs, including the LAC conference.
With this in mind, I invite those who are still active in the community
and are receiving this email to voice their thoughts on this matter for
the purpose of identifying optimal next steps. Thank you.
Best wishes,
Ico
--
Ivica Ico Bukvic, D.M.A.
Creative Technologies in Music
Director -- DISIS, L2Ork, CTM
ICAT Senior Fellow
Virginia Tech
School of Performing Arts – 0141
Blacksburg, VA 24061
(540) 231-6139
ico(a)vt.edu
www.performingarts.vt.edudisis.icat.vt.edul2ork.icat.vt.eduico.bukvic.net
>> as well as consider
>> establishing a foundation that may help facilitate and support critical
>> programs, including the LAC conference.
>
> I think we'd need at least one major sponsor to cover the overheads of a
> foundation. There are a whole bunch of big companies now shipping
> millions of audio-critical products based on the Linux kernel, compared
> to hardly any when we started.
>
> So I'd suggest the first step would be to find someone prepared to reach
> out to the likes of Google, TI or Toyota for support, preferably someone
> used to dealing with corporates. Sponsorship opportunities for this
> year's LAC would be a good, low commitment way for them to get involved.
>
They will most likely want to see an actual registered non profit before
they commit to provide any funding. Samsung might be a good start as they
have already implemented JACK as part of their custom Android "pro"
musician framework. The Linux Foundation will have direct contacts for
corporate sponsors interested in supporting Linux Audio Consortium if any
exist.
A few questions:
- What is the target funding amount?
- Who will be in charge of assigning the funds for payments?
- What will the funds be specifically used for?
- Another option might be simply asking the community to donate
cash/crypto. There must be a few Linux Audio folks who made some decent
returns from btc/eth by now.
- To really take ownership of the funding issue the Consortium can
undertake an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) by creating a Linux Audio Token
which can then be traded on the open crypto market. For example, an
Ethereum ERC20 smart contract can be generated with an initial mint of ex
10 million coins. Linux Audio supporters can purchase Linux Audio Tokens
during the ICO for a discount price of ex. 25c/token. After the ICO the
tokens can be traded on the global crypto market.
If the Consortium reserves 1 million tokens for future use and sells the
remaining 9 million that will provide upto :
9,000,000 x 0.25 = USD$2.250,000
which can be converted to cash/alt coin or used to pay developers directly
with LAT.
The Tokens will not be considered a security because they there will be no
implied returns. Linux Audio folks will simply be able to assist with
funding the Consortium and then optionally speculate on the value of the
tokens on the open market.
If the ICO option is something that the Consortium is interested in I am
happy to assist with the setup process. I would rather the Linux Audio
Consortium could stand on it's own merit without being subject to any
corporate oversight.
--
Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware
