re-thinking LUGs and early planning for the first Canadian LUG summit

Asaf Maruf asafmaruf-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
Thu Nov 8 03:32:04 UTC 2007


I have been in Canada over a month and I really don't see much
activity in open source and Linux. A few days back I attended the Open
Source conference at York but with so many presentations to attend one
doesn't get a chance to meet members of the open source community.

The local groups should continue to meet on a monthly basis and maybe
every quarter try and get all LUGs across Canada together /
communicating.
Of course Micro$oft does this better because it has more money to
throw around. But I strongly believe that we need to be more cohesive,
share experiences and get together to push the government to give FOSS
an equal chance when choosing an IT solution.

Asaf

On 11/7/07, Evan Leibovitch <evan-ieNeDk6JonTYtjvyW6yDsg at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Hi all.
>
> First off, I want to apologize for my lateness in replying; I've been
> swamped.
>
> The quick summary is that I think David's idea is great and I will do
> what I can to offer CLUE resources to make this happen.
>
>
> David J Patrick wrote:
> > On Wed, Nov 07, 2007 at 06:41:01PM -0500, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> >
> >> On Wed, Nov 07, 2007 at 02:04:45PM -0500, David J Patrick wrote:
> >>
> >>> PING !
> >>>
> >>> did this actually get out to the list ?
> >>>
> >> I honestly don't know why people think someone in vancouver cares what a
> >> LUG in toronto is doing.  For the most part they are only interesting to
> >> the people in the local area.
> >>
> That's part of the mandate, if all the LUGs want to do is engage in
> technical self-help. I would suggest that community support and advocacy
> should -- indeed I would argue it really needs to -- advance its tactics
> and methods, just as the software itself has evolved.
>
> Open source is not a novelty anymore in the world of serious IT. Most
> people who care about computing are aware of what Linux and open source
> are, even if that awareness is negative or dismissive. There is an
> active commercially-driven movement against open source that did not
> exist when it was under the radar. I would suggest that there is an
> opportunity for the community to do important things to advance open
> source that the Red Hats and IBMs of the world simply cannot do.
>
>
> > Personally, I feel it's important to do what we can to try and get our
> > governments to recognize and address issues like net-neutrality, the use of
> > open standards, and real cost savings that could come from wider linux
> > deployments. If we just sit on our hands, those decisions will simply be
> > made by the loudest (and richest) lobbiasts. There are coMpanieS that would
> > love to see a hard vendor lock-in at federal, provincial and municipal
> > levels, and some pre-emptive actions would be prudent.
> >
> Indeed.
>
> Given that there are limited skills and limited resources amongst
> advocates in non-technical areas, it is vital that information, tactics
> and contacts be shared amongst LUGs. It could be very useful to TLUG to
> know what the Victoria LUG is doing to convince the provincial
> legislature to be more pro FOSS. At very least it could advocate a level
> playing field and adoption of standards-based protocols for file formats
> and web programming. Such advocacy efforts could be more easily done if
> multiple advocates -- in Toronto, Halifax, Victoria, Edmonton etc. --
> could pool skills and share the load since so much of the research and
> grunt work could benefit all efforts.
>
> If Lennart is right and most open source "advocates" can't (or don't
> care to) see past their immediate circle, then that's a reality we may
> need to deal with. Maybe LUGs will forever be little more than
> personal-level self help, leaving it to vendors to do the lobbying and
> advocacy. To me this would be a wasted opportunity, but I prefer to be
> optimistic and hope that at least some segment of the community cares
> about a bigger picture.
>
> - Evan
>
> --
> The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
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>


-- 
"I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is
much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that
might be wrong." - Richard P. Feynman
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists





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