Volunteers of the open-source project hosting Fosshost, whose services are used by GNOME, Armbian and Debian, and the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), have announced the imminent closure.
The fact is that the head of the project, Thomas Markey, did not get in touch for more than six months, but only he had access to bank accounts and infrastructure.
Users are strongly advised to back up their data as soon as possible and switch to alternative hosts.
Let me remind you that we also talked about the fact that the VPN hosting provider agrees to block access to pirated sites, and also that Thousands of GitHub Repositories Spread Malware That Is Disguised as Exploits.
Since 2020, the British non-profit organization Fosshost has been providing free services to a number of well-known open source projects, including GNOME, KDE, Debian, FreeCAD, IP Fire, ActivityPub (W3), Ubuntu DDE, Ubuntu Unity and so on.
However, recently the project began to have problems in operation, and links to fosshost.org returned 404 error messages. Now, volunteers have announced that the hosting is closing.
Shortly after this post was posted, YCombinator Hacker News got a clarification from one of the project’s supposed volunteers. He writes that Fosshost’s problems arose due to the sudden disappearance of the head of the project, Thomas Markey. It turned out that Marky had not been in contact for about six months, and he was the only person who had access to the bank accounts necessary for the work of the host.
Bleeping Computer journalists, who tried to understand the problem, write that the complete dependence of the project on the Brand has become the point of failure, due to which Fosshost will be forced to stop working.
According to journalists, the first signs of chaos reigning in the management of Fosshost began to appear earlier this year. For example, in August, the hosting company was forced to abandon AArch64, and by September it suspended applications, citing scalability issues. In November, the maintainers were completely stumped, as the Chicago node was down, not rebooting, and not recovering.
Even back then, users were encouraged to explore alternative hosting options or try contacting Marky, who was “the only person who could fix this.”
Do you remember the story of how John McAfee found dead in a Spanish prison?
