Fwd: [talk] Eating your own dog food (was: Re: change back to old name?)

[giovanni_re]

----- Original message -----
From: Ron Guerin <r...@vnetworx.net>
Subject: [talk] Eating your own dog food (was: Re: change back to old
name?)
Date: Mon, 20 May 2013 18:45:11 -0400

On 05/20/2013 05:01 PM, Jay Sulzberger wrote:
> On Mon, 20 May 2013, Ron Guerin wrote:
>
>> It runs on my resources in a local data center, which I pay
>> for, so it's basically not much different now than much of the
>> last 13 years, during which it originally used VA Linux's
>> resources, and for a few years, ran out of a corner of my
>> kitchen.
>
> Ron, thank you again for your work. And thank you also for this
> answer.

There were times (quite a few) when I literally did everything myself,
including the list moderation, although at the time I had that
unfortunate honor, I was unaware the primary moderator had abandoned his
post without notice some months earlier. Volunteers have never exactly
fallen from the trees. Like in anything else in life, there seems to be
no shortage of people who want to be in charge of other people's labors,
but few willing to labor.

> The free software movement requires that we own our machines. We
> must also pay for our own Net connections, and we must either be
> our own sysadmins, or contract with reliable sysadmins who know
> they work for us. That means none of our sysadmins can owe first
> allegiance to Google, nor to Apple, nor to Microsoft.

I don't know what we should refer to Rick Moen as, but the man should
have some kind of title for his efforts:

http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Linux_PR/newlug.html

23. Walk the walk.
It's painfully grotesque to see so-called Linux user groups mailing
out announcements using MS-Outlook, Eudora, or Netscape Messenger
for MS-Windows (or MacOS), or other proprietary mailers for legacy
operating systems -- and visibly maintaining their Web sites using
MS Front Page, Adobe Page Mill, or other junkware -- and hosting
their LUG mailing lists on Yahoo Groups (formerly eGroups and
Onelist, formerly MakeList) or Google Groups. Fortunately, these
LUGs are in the minority, but they convey the message of Linux
being suitable in neither desktop nor server roles.

If you are going to promote and explore Linux, you need to use it.
If you don't know what good, open-source tools for Linux exist to
create and manage Web sites (such as Bluefish, Screem, Mozilla
Composer, Amaya, Quanta Plus, and PHP), then ask around. Ditto
for mail user agents: Ask around, and you'll hear about excellent
native-Linux mailers such as Mutt, Mozilla Thunderbird, Sylpheed,
KMail, Mahogany, Balsa, Aethera, Evolution, Pronto, and Spruce. Ditto
for mailing list hosting: It's just unbelievably feeble and lame to
have Yahoo Groups, Google Groups, Topica, or some other "free"
commercial service run your mailing list when GNU Mailman comes
already set up and working on major Linux distributions, complete
with automatic Web archiving and Web-based administration -- plus you
can even add to it mnoGoSearch as an archive search engine, if you
wish.

Don't volunteer to look like losers in public: As the saying goes,
a LUG needs to "eat its own dog food".

I think this applies to Free Software groups, and tech interest groups
as well. Of course that's just me. These days I see geeks brag about
outsourcing all of their technology interests to someone else. Whoever
could have forseen the day being a tech person meant knowing the number
of someone else's tech support line? I suppose it makes sense if your
business is outsourcing and that's what you're promoting, but that's
about it. I also keep hearing how /hard/ it is to do these things from
people who /aren't/ doing them. Running some basic Internet services
does not require a PhD and all your free time. I know plenty of people
with kids who didn't even finish high school who are more than competent
at doing these things in their scarce free time.

> So, how shall we of the movement in New York City pay for our
> machines, and for our Net connections?

With dollars. The main Bitcoin exchange got street mugged by the DHS
recently. ;)

Had the previous list ever come back somewhere in the 12 days prior to
my having to set it up (again), I wouldn't have bothered. I now don't
much care what becomes of the old rig. The community I care about has
been saved from oblivion. If we end up with two expressions of this
community someday, to paraphrase the wise and wonderful Ruth Shanen,
these things aren't exclusive of one another. Especially if one of them
isn't even a mailing list.

- Ron
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