Got an email with some questions regarding the proposal:
You requested 50000 euro, which at a rate of 60 euro/hr means about 833 hours. Can you provide some more detail on how you arrived at that time estimate? Could you provide a breakdown of the main tasks, and the associated effort?
GitLab was not designed for federation, and is as you mention vast. Doing this with support from upstream would save a lot of time. Have you contacted GitLab on whether they are interested in this effort?
What is your relationship to Heptapod […] and Octobus? How viable do you consider this effort? Is the Mercurial angle enough to get critical mass with users? Will you cover both versioning systems in your federation implementation?
Can you reflect on the ForgeFed specification, and to what extent it would allow for a bridge application to interface with GitLab (a la Bridgy) - rather than going into the rabbithole of implementing in their codebase?
You mention creating a ForgeFed gem, and also that there is no suitable ActivityPub gem. Would the former involve creating a solution for the latter?
If anyone has any feedback regarding the bridge application question, I’d appreciate it.