Insulating the VulkanSceneGraph project and it's users from risks of Geopolitical events

[robertosfield]

Hi All,

I live in Scotland (north part of UK), while no longer in the EU we're still European and for now still part of NATO. Trumps recent rhetoric puts NATO and US/European trade under serious threat. So far the US congress hasn't been able to, is collectively unwilling to reign Trump's worst instincts in, both internally in the US and w.r.t international conduct.

Trump is threatening escalating tariffs and we now have Macron proposing the EU Anti-Coercion Instrument (ACI) is invoked to provide various economic levers that would serious effect US corporations access to the EU market, these go beyond just retaliatory tariffs.

It's pretty alarming to watch this all unfold. As project lead of the VulkanSceneGraph it's my responsibility to guide the project at the code level through to navigating challenges that might happen wholly out of our control or influence. In 25 years of being a open source project lead I have never seen been a period of such high risk transatlantic relations and trade, and feel that we need to start considering how to mitigate against the possible breakdown of systems that we all have relied upon.

Here's some initial thoughts:

1. VulkanSceneGraph is open source, users have rights to keep using and hosting there own git repositories on their machines, companies, regions etc. This can't be revoked so is a significant insurance policy against external events impacting your work.
2. Github is owned by Microsoft so if things get really bad potentially European access to Github could be impacted, which means the following services could be interrupted:
   2.1 VulkanSceneGraph, vsgXchange, vsgImGui, vsgQt, vsgPoints, vsgExamples and many of our dependencies are all hosted on github.
   2.2. vulkanscenegraph.org website is hosted on github.
   2.3. The VulkanSceneGraph forum is hosted on github.

For the overall project having a repository hosted here in Europe as a backup would be sensible. The way git works means that we have the means to create one even if necessary. If crazy stuff did happen we should be able to cobble stuff make into github at a later time when sensible folks get back in charge in the US.

At a personal level I used gmail for my mail client, this might be affected too. Instant messenger/video services like WhatsApp, Zoom etc. could also be impacted. As a European it probably makes sense for me to start looking at hosting email locally and figuring out alternatives for other communication tools.

Would be happy to get thoughts and suggestions on all these topics. Please keep things focused on technical things rather than politics.

Thanks,
Robert.

[robertosfield]

Just came across this european-alternatives. website, I don't know how up to date and extensive it, but might provide a starting place for considering how to create a European mirror of our current github usage etc.

Alternative to github: https://european-alternatives.eu/alternative-to/github
Alternatives for mail: https://european-alternatives.eu/category/email-providers
Alternatives for instant messaging: https://european-alternatives.eu/category/instant-messaging-apps

I don't have familiarity with vast majority of suggested alternatives, the exception is GitLab that I've used a little with client projects. If you have experience with any of these alternatives then let us know.

I the end I'm hoping none of this will be required and we can just continue to work with all the tools we're familiar with, but far better to have done a little scoping out in case we need act quickly to shore things up.

[lufriem]

I'm happy with Proton Mail, as well as other tools from their suite (VPN, drive)

[xarray]

I currently use Gitee (https://gitee.com/xarray) as my main Git repo, as Github is not easy to visit for a long time in my region. :)