Select mailing list system for announcements

[mjherzog]

We need a way to announce major AboutCode proposals and changes to interested parties. The primary purpose is to have a way to officially announce major changes beyond Slack/Gitter and GitHub and keep a record of those announcements. The intended audience is people who are interested in AboutCode projects but are not active in the Slack conversations or GH discussions or issues and do not check the website for news. We also expect that most people who are active in Slack/Gitter or GitHub will join the announcement mailing lists.

The primary use cases are similar to a newsletter because we need a way to make announcements but we want to keep the discussions in GitHub and Slack, not create another channel for discussions within email threads. More specifically we need this for broad reach announcement of changes that will likely affect people who actively use AboutCode software or data. Some recent examples of this type of announcement are:

• Major changes to VulnerableCode to replace "vulnerabilities" with "advisories" (this will merit multiple announcements as we progress)
• Refinement of Copyleft Limited license categories - Enhancement request: Refine License Category - Copyleft Limited dejacode#499

Beyond the actual tool for publishing announcements a key feature is building up email lists of people who are interested in AboutCode and its projects. We will need robust email list management capabilities including subscribe/unsubscribe according to GDPR and other regulations. Regardless of which solution we pick now it should be feasible to transfer email lists to another platform in the future.

It would be highly desirable to use an open source solution but this is a "narrow" application so we do not want to take on self-hosting.

There are many options but a short list is:

• listmonk - good demo at: https://demo.listmonk.app/;

  • Pros:
    • Open source (AGPL)
    • Apparently healthy project
    • Relatively simple deployment with Docker
  • Cons:
    • Requires self-hosting - there are several suppliers who will run a Docker instance for you but none provide any compliance services

• Groups.io

  • Pros:
    • Very commonly used for open source projects (incl. CycloneDX & SPDX) so well-known and low friction for users
    • Provides basic GDPR compliance - https://groups.io/static/compliance#
    • Could also be used for email-based discussions in future if we want that for other use cases
  • Cons:
    • Announcements feature requires Premium plan - $220/year will cover up to 500 members in one Group with unlimited Subgroups
    • Proprietary

• Groups groups

  • Pros:
    • Already available under AboutCode's Google Workspace subscription for the core AboutCode team
    • Google acts as the data processor; seems to be GDPR compliant with specific configuration
    • Could also be used for email-based discussions in future if we want that for other use cases
  • Cons:
    • Declining general popularity
    • Awkward UI

AboutCode could possibly also support announcement functionality for the PURL and VERS specification projects.