Gentoo Is Looking for Infrastructure Sponsors

Gentoo has a problem that does not show up in bug reports: several of its long-running infrastructure sponsors stopped their support this year. The project is now looking for replacements and has put out an official call. Behind gentoo.org sits infrastructure that has to be paid for and operated. For that, Gentoo depends on outside help.

The sponsors page still lists names like Oregon State University's Open Source Lab, CDN77, HP, and Hetzner, but it does not yet reflect who has dropped out. The announcement itself does not name the departing sponsors either. A large part of Gentoo's infrastructure is sponsored; the project itself maintains only a few vital machines. Every dropout hurts.

What Gentoo needs

Gentoo is fairly precise about what it needs. The sponsorship page of the Infrastructure project lists the wishlist, and the requirements are surprisingly modest in places. Organizations whose goals align with Gentoo's are explicitly preferred.

Wanted above all are virtual machines, physical servers, colocation, and money. For VMs, 2 vCPU, 4 GiB RAM, and 25 GB of storage are enough, though many Gentoo services are monolithic and a poor fit for Kubernetes. On the dedicated hardware side, complete root servers such as those Hetzner offers are an option, as are older machines sitting unused in a company rack. Gentoo needs full remote access to them. The sponsor keeps owning the hardware; Gentoo manages the OS and only asks for advance notice before migrations.

Colocation works the other way around: the sponsor provides rack space, power, and connectivity, and Gentoo finds the hardware itself. Non-US capacity is specifically wanted at the moment, though US offers are not turned down. Donated hardware can only be accepted at US hosting locations for now, and plain money goes toward colocation and hosting.

In return, sponsors are listed on the sponsors page and get an entry in the front-page advertising rotation, weighted by the fair-market value of the contribution. Sponsors who prefer not to be named can stay semi-anonymous. Interested parties can reach the infrastructure team at infra@gentoo.org.

Not the only project in this boat

Gentoo is not alone here. Other open-source projects are currently also trying to secure their infrastructure through new sponsors. The LVFS firmware update service, which ships firmware to millions of Linux devices, spent years leaning on the Linux Foundation and Red Hat before hardware vendors stepped up this year: Framework and the Open Source Firmware Foundation joined first, then Lenovo and Dell signed on as premier sponsors at $100,000 a year each, with HP and NVIDIA following.

Gentoo belongs to the larger distributions that run a considerable part of their infrastructure themselves: mirrors, the package build farm, the bug tracker, the wiki, and this very website. If a sponsor drops out, Gentoo cannot simply move the affected services to the resources of a corporate parent. This is not the first such call, either; a similar appeal went out in 2014 when two major sponsors dropped out in the same year.

For companies with idle rack space or unused server hardware, that is a way to support Gentoo directly.