More thoughts on this issue. Sorry about the length. _own/rent property_
I haven't read one argument that has truly justified this kind of expense. My original question as to whether we could utilize the property enough to make it worthwhile still stands. At our present level of growth I think it unrealistic to expect our current and future Executive Boards to have to deal with this. This would be a full-time job for at least one person to handle scheduling and that doesn't even account for things like insurance or volunteers to be there for each time the building is in use. No I strongly suggest that this is not something we are ready for, winfall or no winfall. _server_ I neglected to mention that our current solution is more than adequate to the task of having a web presense. Everything else is just gravy, potentially expensive gravy but certainly not necessary to the continued success of our group. The idea of hosting a variety of distribution ISO files has been bandied about a lot. We already have members providing this in a limited sense. If we were to take this on, we would definitely need to monitor bandwidth and expect to pay more for our exponential increase in usage. Providing mirrors to any and all Linux distributions would be a huge benefit to our local Linux users and take some of the pressure off the main repositories. I highly endorse this idea, it's a way we can give back instead of taking. The thing to remember here is that the more you do on a server the more open to attack you are. The more ports you open, the more vectors you are providing the 'black hats'. Let's not overly complicate the idea here. I think what we are talking about is possibly purchasing a professional piece of equipment with built-in redundancy, possibly multiple hard drives for any possibility for failover. And a place that is willing to let us take up rackspace and access to their 'big fat pipe'. Colocation fees are not cheap but you get complete control of your box. That is both good and bad. As I said before, we can harden such a box as only our more experienced users can. We can have whatever services we want running on it and thus control what we can and cannot do. The problem with this is now going to be taking a poll as to what our hardware requirements are and going from there. It would be nice if we didn't have to pay for the hardware and that some other form of sponsorship could come into play but the fees for collocation and bandwidth usage are potentially high if we take this to the next level. As far as I am concerned once the box is in place only the Executive should be allowed to get access to it. They can decide whether to grant shell access to anyone, I would hope that we would take a very conservative stance on this. The website is our way of communicating to the world. Trying to make more out of it is unnecessary. _promotional items_ I think my suggestion of more promotional items was misconstrued. With more capitol than we presently have we could get a range of items in a wider range of sizes. The idea is to PROMOTE the group. Having our logo and URL splashed on a T-shirt or mug gets our name out there and exposes us to more people than we currently do. The idea of promotion is typically done at a loss to the organization. You lay out X dollars and you may recoup a portion of that in sales (if you sell the items) but the potential to reap other benefits is higher with more exposure. This is all I was getting at. Hell I'd like a CLUG water bottle or a few more items of CLUGwear! _donation to needy individuals_ As a former Executive and party to some cursory plans to do this I am excited at the possibility of us being able to do this on a larger scale than we originally envisioned. We wanted to get in touch with some charity organization that we could get a used computer loaded with Linux and OSS to a needy family, no strings attached. What they do with it is their prerogative but we could then go to the Government and prove that our group is working towards bettering our society, this looks good on paper and works towards our charitable status, makes it easier to get equipment donated to us. The thought process was that we would take our funds to purchase said equipment. As such we weren't looking at doing very many at a time in fact we were shooting for something around the Christmas holidays. There was no expectations beyond putting Linux into someone's hands who might not have the opportunity any other way. Yes there is potential for abuse, someone could sell what we gave them or god-forbid, load it with a proprietary OS but that isn't our concern. Anyway, with a large amount of capitol we could look at providing some very nice machines to some needy people. _sponsoring an Open Source project_ Apache and KDE were only examples. I would like to see the money go to something more local but then again, I would also like to see the money go to something worthwhile that really needs it. There is a plethora of projects out there and we may be restricted to only those that are residing in Canada (?), these rules will have to be determined. Another way of looking at this could be to offer monetary compensation to local developers who are working on a worthy project. Again, this gets bogged down in deliberations on "what is worthy?", "how do we determine an appropriate way to compensate these people?" and so forth. It could mean some money for some hungry developers in town and in turn give a boost to a project. I think we need to find out whether anything we do with said money HAS to remain in Calgary or Canada. We could stipulate this be a new project. As I said there are lots of possibilities but the idea of further promoting an Open Source project in some way is delicious. _legal_ We could donate a portion of the money to legal funds for Open Source or developers. I'm sure the OSDL has a legal fund that accepts donations so they can continue to fight the legal system. It looks like the Mplayer developers are under threat, how cool would it be to contribute to their legal costs so that we can continue to watch DVD's in Linux? Again the question of whether it has to be a Canadian organization that gets this money is there. Do we have anything like the OSDL in Canada? The Canadian Linux Users Exchange comes to mind but I don't think they are doing much and I know they aren't even remotely as big as the OSDL (probably like comparing apples to oranges, forgive me). I'm not a big fan of law but ducking my head in the sand isn't going to make it go away. I think we are looking at more litigation for Open Source in the future. We will be fighting more legal battles as time goes on. Personally I think the lawyers are the true winners here and the decisions end up being self-serving but we may end up with some meaningful legislation in our favour. The problem here is that this is a global problem, different countries deal with patents and copyright issues differently. How do we determine where the most aid needs to be lent? This is a toughie for me and also very scary. We feel immune from legal threat because of the GPL or other similar licensing but how safe are we? _the moral of the story_ I think the idea of getting money from gambling proceeds is dodgy but I don't disagree with it. We could beat this issue to death. I think that this decision should be left to the Tier 2's. Input from everyone is fine but again, I am adamant that this decision be left to the voting members of the group as they have been described in our Bylaws. While I don't necessarily believe that these would be ill-gotten-gains, it does raise moral issues, so we are obligated to do something meaningful with the money (if we are going to do it at all and that remains to be seen). Keep in mind that some of our members (and/or their family and friends) will be putting in real time to help us earn this money and that should not be dismissed. That's my opinion, if you are dead-set against the idea, then vote no (if you are a Tier 2). This group is sometimes going to do things that some people will object to. We should respect the majority when decisions like this are made. I think that Michael has stood up for what he believes and stated his case. Others have too. This could be a divisive issue but don't let it detract from the group. It is purely an opportunity for us to get to a new level. I'm probably repeating myself. There have been some interesting comments so far and some that were not well thought out but this should discourage nobody from giving their input. Keep it coming. Jarrod _______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [email protected] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) **Please remove these lines when replying
