Idea: 'ethical hosting' [formerly mailman service (free for FOSS projects)]

[Pjotr Prins <pjotr.public12@thebird.nl>]

Continuing this train of thought: there is actually a business case
for something like ethical hosting. For us it is 'easy' to create
services such as mail servers with IMAP and web front-end, mail-main
servers, wikimedia servers etc. But it is not easy for everyone, And
it is certainly not easy to get it right, i.e., setup and security.

Individuals and companies are willing to pay for VPS, and I am sure
they are willing to pay for a full FOSS stack deployable on a VPS.
There is added value and therefore money. 

With Guix we can make configurable deployments that gives people to
deploy anywhere. I know many companies and organisations (such as
universities!) outsource their mail servers to companies such as
google and Microsoft. They ought to be getting concerned about
privacy, not least because of recent changes in American law - let
alone those that operate in less lawful countries.

It is too much to achieve for one person, but I think if we can get a
number of people together we can turn Guix work into cash. Mailman
would be a good start. Next a configurable mail server with webmail to
compete with gmail and protonmail?

On Tue, Apr 18, 2017 at 11:18:14AM +0000, ng0 wrote:
> Good and interesting idea, if you have the money.
> I prefer to work on snippets and instructions, deploying more servers
> than necessary isn't an option for myself at the moment.

I don't think we should offer VPS (at first). But we can offer the
choice of using other VPS'. The VPS marked is overcrowded and very
competitive - I would not want to compete with that. I want to compete
with companies that offer hosting, but do not provide the software
stack. I also want people to have access to their own VPS. That is the
ethical part.

> Mantioning mailman and GuixSD: We'd first need to get all of Mailman
> packaged. 2/3 parts are still missing, I have started to work on hyperkitty
> but if you are interested and willing to continue it would be nice.

Yes. postfix we also need.

> Afterwards we would need a system service, and then it would be good
> to try this out in the wild (or intranet) to see what can be done to
> run this service (and all connected ones) in a container.

Aye, Guix rocks so much it hurts ;).

Pj.

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