On Sun, Apr 26, 2020 at 7:14 PM Tom Forbes <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello, > Given the recent worldwide situation I’ve found myself thinking a lot > about contingency plans recently. I wanted to raise a question about our > reliance on Google Groups and if we had any contingency plans if this > service was shut down? > > To put it politely, it's pretty obvious that Google Groups is in > “maintenance mode” and there is little, if any, active development. > Alongside this: > 1. Google has apparently broken core functionality like advanced > searching, and left it broken for years at a time ( > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups#Google_Groups) > 2. Google itself has shut down down maintenance-mode services before even > if they have an active user base (see Google Reader) > 3. Google Groups clearly doesn’t bring any revenue to Google at all, and > is probably a legal liability. > > Given this, if we have not already we should maybe consider what we would > do if it was announced tomorrow that Google Groups was shutting down in 3 > to 6 months? > > Perhaps we’ve already considered this but I couldn’t find any discussions > about this (and it’s hard to search for threads that reference “Google > Groups” as every thread contains that string!). Some food for thought: the > Python development mailing lists (i.e > https://mail.python.org/archives/list/[email protected]/) are > browsable through a service called HyperKitty ( > https://gitlab.com/mailman/hyperkitty), which is built with Django. We > could potentially ask for a mailing list on the python.org mail server or > we could host HyperKitty and MailMan ourselves? > > > I think python.org and Django are managed by different (legal) entities so it doesn't make sense for Django mailing lists to use the domain name python.org. Actually as far as I see it, we only need mailing lists and don't need any web interface features we get from Google Groups. Personally my email is powered by Google which is like Gmail and I assign labels per mailing list, so if I want to search I can just type text and the label name and I can see any messages since I joined the mailing lists (I never delete messages). I think if, if Google will close Google Groups they will give us at least a few months notice and then we can discuss it, why do we have to worry about it now? But just in case, I think running a (free software & open source) mailing list software on a specific server will do, something similar to what python.org is doing but not using their domain name (unless Django becomes parts of the python.org legal entity).
By the way, is Django a commercial entity? Why does it use the .com domain suffix? Python uses .org, but doesn't Django use .org too? From reading the website I see that the Django Software Foundation is non-profit. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers (Contributions to Django itself)" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/django-developers/CABD5YeHLNhJXTGbaM%2BrYcoM9emvbHwhKxabQ0OoVTBPJyypt%2BA%40mail.gmail.com.
