[buug] Reviving CalLUG

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Mark Lu (excelblue at gmail.com):

> Good point. I tend to be quite far on the practical end of things
> when it comes to the idealistic/practical spectrum....

Ahem.  It's vexing to see what I said shoehorned into an ideology box,
when that is the very opposite of what I thought I said.  Was I that
unclear?  If so, my apologies, and I'll fix that now:

Speaking for myself, I eschew hosted Internet services where I can,
instead, without significant problems, control and run them using
resources I control, for -=pragmatic=- reasons.  I consider surrendering
control of data and code to people I don't know and have no reason to
trust to be a very risky thing to do.  In business, to quote something
the guy I shave wrote on the subject for IDG back in 2001:

  An executive who allows his company to becomes dependent on software
  he is not allowed to see inside, let alone change, has lost control of
  his business, and is on the wrong side of a monopoly relationship with a
  vendor who can thereby control his business. With open source, the
  executive is in control, and nobody can take that away. The opportunity
  to reduce and control business risk is a key concern of any CEO. 

http://www.itworld.com/print/36449


> ...and the main thing on my mind was only how to get the mailing list
> accomplished in the simplest (but not necessarily best) way.

Then, I'm a bit confused, now.  Isn't the _simplest_ way to do nothing
and leave everyting on CalMail?  Why would a migration to Google Groups
(what you were just discussing) be simpler than doing nothing?

If, in the alternative, you _were_ proposing something that requires
more work than doing nothing at all, alternatives indeed include Google
Groups, but also include simple GNU Mailman installations such as I just
helped Peter Knagg migrate PenLUG's mailing list presence to (and helped
him migrate PenLUG's Apache/TWiki instance to Apache/FosWiki).  Which
has some seriously significant advantages over outsourcing to proprietary
(and hosted) software.

And that was really what I was saying.



> Thanks for the reminder of something that may be very important for a
> huge portion of our target members.

Yr. welcome.  Again, if it's ever desired to move the entire mailing
list with history included to a fully functioning Mailman instance, I 
can help.

> In terms of access, I'd actually argue that there's no real
> disadvantage in running sessions in Dwinelle or Barrows, which are
> open until midnight and 11pm respectively, unlike Soda Hall, which
> is restricted by keycard after 6:30pm. They're accessible and
> provide for greater exposure to the general population.

Good point.