Re: [Fsfe-uk] [Proposal] Mailing lists

[Alex Hudson]

On Wed, 2003-10-22 at 13:02, Ramanan Selvaratnam wrote:
> Dunno about the others but Savannah has no PHP (GPL compatibility I
> think) or SQL databases (lack of administrator).

I can understand the DB thing. I don't think there's a problem with PHP
wrt the GPL though, it's probably more a question of admin again.

> Also shell accounts cannot be given to anyone without being in close
> contact.

Giving people shell access is always a big step.

> Interestingly there are other attempts to get OOo to integrate tightly
> <http://www.gnome.org/~michael/XimianOOo/img0.html>

OOo presents a set of its own problems; JCA not withstanding. 

> We are sort of thinking about localising GNUCash. Aren't we?

We were vaguely thinking about tax handling for businesses, yes. I think
that is probably a proposal that would be subsumed into whatever grant
thing we end up doing: it's definitely worth doing, just needs someone
to take 'ownership' somehow (I noted on UCOL the other day someone had
done some interesting work on payroll; any experiences please share ;)

> what we would need first is a bit more interest from affs memebers
> interested in this kind of thing excluding mjr and myself.
> 
> I know  only one UK based central figure in GNOME development who seems
> enthusiastic about getting a mailing list going except the admin
> responsibilities. 

Well, I personally don't think AFFS should be stepping quickly down the
road of offering project hosting: I think there are people better
equipped to do it than us, for a start. A number of ISPs offer PHP/MySQL
hosting to free software projects - it's about core skills, and AFFS
isn't really going to be able to provide hosting on a small scale,
that's not what we do. (I think this is a separate question from that of
specialisation, though, where it might be that AFFS is able to usefully
contribute something if the need were very particular?).

Co-ordination, though, is almost the name of the game. One of the
reasons I'm against having too many AFFS lists (although I do like the
idea of an annoucement list, possibly the members list too [since we
kind of have that already]) is that it sucks people away from the main
areas of congregation at a time when we're trying to bring people
together. 

I'm mostly against free software orgs in the UK 'competing', and
especially AFFS attempting to do things which other people already do in
much better style than we could. However, there is definitely an
argument for providing the glue/grease. I'm not really up on the UK
Gnome community, I think the only person I've spoken to in the last 6
months was Telsa on irc the other day. So, I don't really have an idea
of what these people are doing or whether or not there are things AFFS
could do to help them. 

Cheers,

Alex.