[buug] Reviving CalLUG

[Mark Lu]

On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 2:10 PM, Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:

> 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
>

I'd agree, it is a huge risk and leap of faith to use such hosted services,
but from my perspective, there's risks on both sides. The risks of running
your own resources include losing control if you were to get into a major
accident (eg. run over by a bus), having inadequate resources to maintain
the resources (eg. power surge at 2am), or in the case of an organization,
a member seizing control (eg. centos.org domain name incident).

While the consequences of the risks of losing control of data to an untrusted
corporation is much greater, I personally feel that the actual risks are much
less than the simple issues of running your own resources. My experience
shows that it just happens less often with untrusted corporations.

In short, it's just balancing something very risky with something more risky.
The bigger question is where to draw the line. One of the reasons why I
considered Google Groups is because the data on the mailing lists is
public anyways, and we have no monetary interest.

> 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.

As was mentioned earlier, the lack of public archiving in CalMail means that
it isn't fulfilling the requirements. Hence, it's thrown out of the
equation when
comparing simplest solutions that do fulfill the requirements.

Balancing out the advantages and disadvantages is a difficult topic. This
conversation has really gotten me thinking about the relative importance of
certain aspects as it pertains to a LUG.


-- 
Mark Lu