On Tuesday 27 July 2010 08:46:12 Sean Dague wrote: ... > Now two questions that have been bubbling around in my head, and I'd > like comments on them. > > 1) Do we want another mailing list like mhvlug-chatter or something > which will specifically allow all manner of off topic posting (like Dan > suggested)? If people find that appealing, it's pretty easy to set it up.
I'll just say this: NYLUG tried this because there were so many political rants on [nylug-talk] that another mailing list was created, [nylug-social]. Sounds great, but nobody uses it. Anytime a decision that a topic needs to go over to the other mailing list, the conversation simply ends. Your mileage may vary, but that's what I've seen happen in practice. > 2) A couple of years ago Joe brought up the idea of changing our name to > be more inclusive. Make it an Open Source Users Group, or Open Source > Society. At the time I wasn't really ready to hear it. But I think > that as our programs and member ship grow and shift it might be time. > Linux would still be a part of that, but this is really a bigger tent now. I don't like the term "open source" because of the ambiguity it creates. For instance, the proprietary Nvidia driver has the source available -- so that's "open source" even though it's not "free software". The term "free" is likewise ambiguous; there's "free as in beer" and "free as in freedom". And "freedom" is ambiguous too -- within this context you could argue for the BSD because of the freedom it allows to release binary-only modifications, or argue for the freedom of users to have access to distributed modifications such as the GPL requires. If we had a talk at MHVLUG about OpenSolaris, ReactOS, BSD, etc -- I wouldn't consider that off-topic. But changing the name to reflect this isn't as easy as it sounds. -- Chris -- Chris Knadle [email protected] _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium Aug 4 - Samba Sep 1 - BOINC Oct 6 - Creating Firefox Extensions
