Plenty of open source projects keep going on goodwill alone, with contributors putting in the hours and expecting nothing back. While others lean on outside support like cash, donated hardware, or someone else covering the hosting bill.
This kind of support rarely gets much attention, but these needs are some of the most foundational aspects of any project that’s serious about growing.
Gentoo falls in the second group. The source-based Linux distribution, built around the Portage package manager, runs largely on sponsored infrastructure, as it can only manage to maintain a few vital machines.
Sadly, many sponsors that had backed Gentoo all these years have decided to stop making contributions. The project is now looking for replacements and has put out a call for infrastructure sponsors.
Currently, its sponsors page lists names such as Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab, CDN77, HP, and Hetzner, but it may not yet reflect the dropouts.
There are five ways to help, as laid out on the sponsorship page of Gentoo’s wiki, with preference being given to supporters who share the project’s vision of software that respects choice and stays open to user-driven changes.
The first way is to accept donated machines for the project’s hosting locations in the US. They are not asking for much; anything good enough to handle server-focused tasks in today’s time is a good offering for them to use.
Next is Colocation, a type of physical hosting. The sponsor would provide rack space, power, and connectivity, while Gentoo finds the hardware to put in it. Capacity outside the US is their most urgent need at the moment, though offers from the US are welcome too.
Third are virtual machines, with a minimum of 2 vCPUs, 4GB of RAM, and 25GB of storage. The project says that it is leaning more on the cloud wherever it can, but many of its services are monolithic, and that Kubernetes would suit them poorly.
The fourth way is full-package hosted physical servers. The wiki gives two examples: a root server like the ones Hetzner offers, or a sponsor’s older or unused servers with Gentoo getting full remote access.
In that second case, the sponsor would still own and manage the hardware, whereas Gentoo would take care of the operating system and remote management, only asking for advance notice before any migration events.
The last is plain old money. Any donated funds would go toward paying for colocation and hosting.
A call to act
Gentoo is far from the only project that needs this kind of backing.
Take LVFS, the firmware update service for Linux. It leaned heavily on the Linux Foundation and Red Hat, with Framework and the Open Source Firmware Foundation pitching in $10,000 a year.
Then Lenovo and Dell joined at the Premier tier, at $100,000 a year each, along with HP and NVIDIA, who followed soon after. I would call that a win for LVFS and a sign that sponsors are out there for projects that go looking.
Maybe your organization has spare rack space, or you have money lying around and want it to do some good. Either way, someone has to host the servers behind projects like this, and Gentoo’s infrastructure team is available at infra@gentoo.org for any infrastructure sponsorship-related queries.
For one, it is largely responsible for supporting and maintaining OpenRC on Linux, and is often the go-to-distro that other distros piggyback off its OpenRC configs and scripts.
Being probably the biggest source-based distribution, it provides invaluable work on developing a system which can be compiled from source that other distro maintainers can look to for guidance.
Portage is also one of the best package managers I have used. It takes into account packages that need to be rebuilt when build dependencies also update. On Arch Linux, I sometimes have to manually reinstall a package like qt6ct when KDE dependencies update. Portage takes care of this automatically when doing a deep update.
In a time when many dystopian laws and surveillance tools like age verification and facial recognition are being enforced, we do not have many distros left that could provide security and privacy measures to bypass these issues by supporting alternative tools. Tools like systemd, which has merged the pull request to include a birth date field in preparation for age verification, tend to develop a monopoly on most distros because of the limited capacity and free time developers have to support alternatives while trying to keep up with other projects. I’m not trying to bash systemd, though, but the fact it is the most dominant init system on most major distros creates a problem for users, especially activists and journalists, who need to protect their identity in this increasingly threatening and dangerous capitalist hellscape.
Gentoo supports many, many packages. It provides the ability to create a system using various combination of tools coming from the GNU, BSD, systemd, and other families. While other distros like Arch may also provide some alternatives, not many distros come close to scale that Gentoo offers. If Gentoo cannot survive, it would be a massive blow to FOSS and our technological sovereignty overall.