13th December "Smack Down" Meeting

[Christopher Browne]

On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 2:58 PM, Myles Braithwaite
<me-qIX3qoPyADtH8hdXm2+x1laTQe2KTcn/@public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Last night at the GTALUG board meeting the idea of having a second
> annually "Smack Down" meeting in December
> <http://gtalug.org/wiki/Meetings:2011-12>. The topics that came up
> were IDE/Editors and Relational vs. Document vs. Key Value databases.
> Anyone else have suggestions for topics or would like to be on a
> panel?

How about X.org versus XFree86?  :-)

Actually, this is less interesting, as meeting topics go, as XFree86
hasn't released any code since 2008, which is exceedingly interesting,
and rather sad, as it used to be a really vital piece of
infrastructure.  Quite a cautionary tale - it is remarkable how
quickly something forkable can become effectively irrelevant, given
suitably troublesome mistakes.

Mind you, perhaps this *is* interesting, albeit difficult to have a talk on.

XFree86 used to be Really Essential, and in the course of perhaps 2
years, it disappeared from all important distributions.  The last
place that it remained was on NetBSD, and even there, it was optional.

It'll be interesting to see what happens with LibreOffice versus
OpenOffice.org; I suspect that a similar dynamic is taking place,
albeit for somewhat different reasons.

And Mark Shuttleworth should certainly watch all of this with care; if
Unity causes sufficient irritation, that could turn Ubuntu into a
curiosity quicker than anyone would expect.
-- 
When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"
--
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