Re: Berkeley Raspberry Pi meeting March 1st -- Jam Time!

[Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com>]

Quoting Aaron (acohen36@gmail.com):

> Just as a suggestion, would you (Tom) and/or other friends, technical
> acquiantances and local Raspberry Pi aficionados consider creating
> a special mailing-list perhaps even modeled after this one -- this
> Googlegroup for the Berkeley Linux User Group -- specifically
> dedicated to your Raspberry Pi events and projects?

I would suggest going slow on adopting such measures, and doing them
only when/if the level of Berkeley Pi postings' traffic becomes
semi-problematic on this mailing list (aka Google Group).  

There's been in the past a tendency (in LUGs) to think that every newly
launched effort requires a separate mailing list, leading to a profusion
of such mailing lists, all of them basically ghost towns.  IMO, that is
an outcome to be avoided.

The most important and initial question, as usual for technical
measures, should be 'What problem are we trying to solve, with this?'  
Eventually, the answer might become 'Too much Berkeley Pi message
traffic overwhelming the BerkeleyLUG mailing list'.  When that has
occurred is of course a judgement call for the listadmins to make.

In the meantime, Tom might want to adopt a standard prefix for Subject
headers about Berkeley Pi (like, say, 'Berkeley Pi:').  Among other
advantages, this helps recipients use filters to classify incoming
mailing list mail by topic (or autofile it, or discard it, etc.) as they
prefer.


> Are you (Tom) perhaps trying to attract *all* Raspberry Pi users to
> your events, even including those not using Linux on their devices??

I obviously don't speak in any way for Tom, but, frankly, why not?  
If people running weird proprietary operating systems[1] on their RPis 
want to come and do maker-like activities with other enthusiasts, 
I see no reason they ought not to be welcome.

Also, at the risk of posing a troublesome question, what's so holy about
Linux, anyway?  Here's a gedankenexperiment for you to consider:
Suppose, tomorrow, there were a court decision that effectively
terminated the Linux kernel project for reasons of legal infractions,
and supposed it were likely that this judgement would be final and have
enforcement teeth to it.  What would you do?  Candidate answer:  You and
whole organised communities of Linux users would do a quick migration to
either one of the BSD kernels or to the Illumos (ex-OpenSolaris) kernel,
and basically this would take only about a week and not make a huge
difference except that hardware support would be a bit thinner than
we're used to for the following six months.  And when the dust settled,
would you really care which kernel you were running atop?  I rather
think 'no'.


Anyway:

A possibly-comparable situation:  Back in 1998 when I and a few other
people were planning the original Windows Refund Day, our original
assumption was that everyone who showed up would be doing so because
they were Linux/BSD users who found the obligatory MS-Windows 9x
preloads on their x86 gear irksome -- but then we started hearing from 
several substantial minority interests who had their own problems with
the preload policies:

1.  Solaris x86 users.  (One of these, my acquaintance Brett Glass,
    kept giving interviews claiming Windows Refund Day management
    was unfairly hostile to proprietary OSes because we were all 
    Communists or something.  He didn't get a lot of traction with
    this because we were cheerfully welcoming rather than hostile.)

2.  Major corporate IT people irked by having to pay for a Win9x 
    licence for each machine they intended to run WinNT, WinNT Server,
    or Novell NetWare on, instead.

These folks all had legitimate points, and we were happy, once we
noticed them, to include them in our events and literature.


[1] Or exotic open source OSes for ARM.  I'll cheerfully admit
I was totally unaware of RISC OS until just now, so thank you, Aaron!

-- 
Cheers,                     "Why doesn't anyone invite copyeditors to parties,
Rick Moen                   when we're such cool people out with whom to hang?"
rick@linuxmafia.com                        -- @laureneoneal (Lauren O'Neal)
McQ! (4x80)

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "BerkeleyLUG" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to berkeleylug+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/berkeleylug/20200214190017.GH12198%40linuxmafia.com.