ESR’s Loadsharers page

Loadsharers is a volunteer network of people agreeing to fund Load Bearing Internet People so the Internet’s infrastructure will stay healthy.

If you don’t know what a Load Bearing Internet Person is you might want to read this, read this first.

This is my adviser page. To follow my Loadsharers-related updates as they issue, subscribe to my feed on Patreon or SubscribeStar.

I’m also on Liberapay and at PayPal, but those don’t have notification facilities.

Why me as an adviser?

I founded and designed Loadsharers.

I’ve been doing critical infrastructure work since 1992.

I helped define the open-source movement.

My specialty areas: Internet-facing critical service daemons, languages and tools, graphics libraries.

How I describe LBIPs

Need: How much financial strain I think they’re under. This might change over time as they get more patrons - I’ll try to give their remittance links so you can check for yourself.

Criticality: How much we stands to lose now if the LBIP collapses.

Past service: Often LBIPs knocked themselves out for decades to make the infrastructure we all rely on now, and got very little thanks for it. I feel like this deserves some reward. If you agree, you can do something about it.

My list of LBIP candidates

Links, where I can give them, are to the LBIP’s account on Patreon or some other remittance service.

Dave Täht. Without him, your buffers would still be bloated, your WiFi would be fluky and slow, and now he’s fighting to prevent an ISP power-grab against the router infrastructure. Need: Very high. Criticality: High. Past service: Very high.
Simon Kelley. (Simon promises a Patreon link soon) Maintains Dnsmasq, the most widely-used DNS implementation in the world, essentially solo. A new face in LBIP-land. Need: Medium. Criticality: High. Past service: High.
Me. Also now on SubscribeStar for those of you unhappy with Patreon. GIFLIB, GPSD, NTPsec, irkerd, repository conversions for major projects, my 17-year effort to clean up the manual-page corpus - all that and now organizing a network to fund other LBIPs. Need: High. Criticality: High: Past service: High.
Paul Eggert. Maintains the IANA timezone database. Ubiquitous in key open-source projects for decades. Criticality: High. Need: Unknown. Past service: Very high.
Harlan Stenn. Has maintained Dave Mills’s NTP suite (which the NTPsec project I lead forked from) for many thankless years. The strain cost him his health. Need: High. Criticality: Moderate. Past service: High.

I will add links and more as I discover them. It’s early days yet.

My list of other LBIP advisers

An important feature of the Loadsharers design is that it needs to be robust against single-point failure. Thus, I should not be the only person advising loadsharers where their support money can usefully go.

Dave Täht, besides being an LBIP himself, is very well qualified to be an adviser. The link is to his adviser page.

I have three more candidate advisers presently in mind and will list them here if they agree to help.

Eventually we’ll have more advisers. They’ll have their own Loadsharers pages which will link to each other and back to here so that each one both shares in and contributes to the credibility of all of them.

Advice to advisers: have a page organized roughly like this one. It will be helpful if we’re all offering similar classification systems to loadsharers.