Right, but you could have just made one yourself

And then there would be a bus factor of one. It’s not just about making a helm chart for myself, it’s about having something that can be shared with the community, that doesn’t depend on any single person to be maintained and updated.

It’s about having an organization that provides “packages” for Kubernetes, for people/orgs that don’t have the time, expertise, and energy to maintain them.

I greatly respect Ananace, who is in the comments of this post, and mentioned their Helm charts. The work is excellent. But looking through the commits, it’s just one person, doing something that primarily consists of bumping version numbers. Contrast this to the Matrix ESS helm chart, where the commits consist of many more contributors, and also include feature additions to the helm chart.

Hello Ananace! :)

I actually have seen your helm charts many, many times before when searching for matrix, synapse, or lemmy on Artifacthub.

An official helm chart isn’t really a hard requirement to me, even if I were to use one and it were to stop getting maintained, I could continue on my own. But an official helm chart has big community benefits that are very important to me. Like, there becomes the option of paid support, which is a must have for many entities. Also, an official organization may support a wider variety of usecases than someone making helm charts for personal use.

I also ended up chatting with one of the core devs of Synapse about ways to improve regular Python Synapse for use with Kubernetes back in the ending of January, so hopefully it’ll improve in that direction when time allows

Do you know anything about the claims that they have rewritten synapse in rust?

Yes and no. There are many things that are much easier with Kubernetes, once you figure Kubernetes out.

High availability is the most notable example — yes, it’s doable in docker, via something like swarm, but it’s more difficult. In comparison, the ideas of clustering and working with more than one server are central to the architecture of Kubernetes.

Another thing is that long term deployments with Kubernetes can be more maintainable, since everything is just yaml files and version is just a number. If you store your config in code, then it’s easier to replicate it to another server, either internally, or if you share it for other people to use (Helm is somewhat like this).

This helm chart is not just matrix/synapse, but also element (web ui), and “matrix authentication service”, which adds SSO/OIDC support to a normal synapse instance, which is pretty neat. I haven’t seen any helm charts that include the full matrix stack, just separate synapse or element helm charts. And helm definitely makes deploying services to Kubernetes easier than other ways of deploying applications.

The other reason why I like an official helm chart, is because I have seen unofficial one’s be stopped being maintained by the community member(s) maintaining them. With an official one, it will (probably) be maintained indefinitely.

Damn. Yast had some really unique features like the ability to configure grub, which cockpit doesn’t have.

Licenses like SSPLv1

The SSPL requires that all software used to deploy SSPL software is open sourced. If I deploy my software on Windows, do I have to provide the source code for Windows? What about the proprietary hardware drivers, or Intel Management Engine?

The SSPL is not the next generation of licenses, it is effectively unusable. And both Redis and Mongo, dual licensed their software as the SSPL, and a proprietary license — effectively making their entire software proprietary.

make money without risk of a cloud vendor snapping up their software (think Redis, MongoDB, etc) need a place at the table.

Except Redis, and Mongo were making money. They had well valued, well earning SAAS offerings — it’s just that the offerings integrated into existing cloud vendors would be more popular (because vendor lock in). They just wanted more money, and were hoping that by going proprietary, they could force customers away from the cloud offers to themselves, and massively increase their revenue… They did not get that.

Another thing is that it’s not “stealing” Mongo/Redis’ when cloud vendors offer SAAS’s of Mongo/Redis. Mongo/Redis, and their SAAS offerings, are only possible because the same cloud vendors put more money than Mongo/Redis make yearly into Linux and other software that powers the SAAS offerings of Mongo/Redis, like Kubernetes. Without that software, Mongo/Redis wouldn’t have a SAAS offering at all.

I definitely think that it’s bad when a piece of software doesn’t get any funding it needs to develop, especially when it powers much more modern software, like XZ. But Mongo/Redis weren’t suffering from a lack of funding at all. They’re just mad they had to share their toys, and tried to take them away. But it didn’t even matter in the end.

I switched to Incus for my homelab.

Blogpost: https://moonpiedumplings.github.io/projects/build-server-6/

I use a wacom intuos + xournal++.

The wacom is nice because it has bluetooth and pretty much “just works” on Linux.

Xournal++ lets me edit pdf files and/or export stuff as pdf. I also like that I can add text with xournal++.

Because you can run a “rootfull xwayland” session which is essentially an X11 session but rewritten to be more maintanable.

After this, it’s a lot harder to be opposed to the loss of X11, because you don’t really lose it.