As mentioned in our previous blog post, thanks to your donations we do not only have enough to pay the server bills. But we can also pay somebody to work part-time on postmarketOS from the donations, which will be a first since we moved to OpenCollective!
Jane: systemd, musl, and upstreaming
For starters we have decided to pay for upstreaming patches to improve the compatibility between musl and systemd. We have agreed to pay Jane, one of the postmarketOS Trusted Contributors to do this. For the sake of transparency, the agreement is as follows:
- Jane will freelance as a student (max. 20 hours a week).
- Jane will bill for work related to:
- Figuring out and documenting which patches in the postmarketOS systemd repo are upstreamable, and which aren't.
- Getting patches into upstreamable state, pushing PRs, discussing with maintainers, addressing the feedback, and repeat.
- Learning systemd internals, code style, and whatever is needed to be able to push those patches.
- If some patches have a fit in musl, preparing them, sending them to the mailing list, discussing with maintainers, addressing the feedback, and repeat.
- We have set a maximum limit on expense close to the money we have saved from the beginning of the year. That is certainly flexible depending on how well this goes for both parties.
- Jane will keep the community and the team updated on the work that gets done.
This is the first time we go into an economic agreement, and the first time we are going to fund development. We understand there will be lots of lessons to be learned, so of these terms might change as the work gets done.
Why fund this project and not (insert my favorite project that needs attention)?
postmarketOS has very limited funds, and this is a hard decision. However, the team has identified the lack of compatibility between musl and systemd as one of the critical points to improve the future stability of postmarketOS.
In addition, we believe that money is best spent on a project that would otherwise be very unlikely to be done by volunteers. We deeply appreciate everybody in our community doing volunteer work, including team members like Clayton and Pablo working full-time or part-time without more support than external grants. However, volunteer work cannot reach everywhere. While some projects provide lots of non-economic rewards to people working on them, others don't. Improving the compatibility between systemd and musl is within the second group, and thus why we believe it's important to fund it.
Why Jane?
Jane is a postmarketOS Trusted Contributor, she was the first person that managed to boot a postmarketOS device with systemd as proof-of-concept (back in June 2023), she has been contributing to the systemd work in postmarketOS, and rebased the set of Open Embedded patches on top of new releases several times. Within our project, she is certainly the most appropriate person to do this work.
She is not a musl or systemd contributor, and she will have to continue learning the conventions of those communities. However, we don't think that this will be a big hurdle. We think that paying for one of our contributors who is already very familiar with postmarketOS and understands exactly what we need, to learn about those communities is a smart decision. Both short-term and long-term.
If you appreciate the work we're doing on postmarketOS, consider joining our OpenCollective.