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

[Alex Hudson]

On Wed, 2003-10-22 at 15:08, Ramanan Selvaratnam wrote:
> > OOo presents a set of its own problems; JCA not withstanding. 
> 
> Dont know what JCA is but would like to know...

Joint Copyright Assignment. It's a bit like the FSF CA, but allows your
software to be used in a proprietary product. It suffers from the same
problem of making it difficult for developers to join the project, which
I think is something OOo suffers particularly from - I have seen Michael
Meeks evangalise the project to developers, I'm not sure how successful
his campaign is at the moment though :) OOo is big and bad, awful lot of
things to get your head around.

> No you understood this wrong.
> The discussion on GNOME-UK  was all about the feasibility of a mailing
> list to get it started off.

Sorry, the discussion had wandered into PHP/MySQL/Sourceforge, etc., and
I assumed it was being suggested that we do something similar.

> As a separate point of hosting free software projects ... don't we
> already have some infrastructure in UKFSN to a good extent (no shell
> account facility but with PHP, Perl, MySQL, PhpMyadmin etc) ?

For 'we' == 'AFFS', no, we don't use UKFSN at all unless I'm mistaken.
We've been given some great space from Positive Internet, who are
another extremely cool company who host free software projects. These
are among quite a few: I can think of UKLinux, Bytemark, and others who
all offer free/cheap space/services to free software people.

> Mailing lists are seperate though.
> When you run one instance extending another list is not a big deal and
> additional issue. This very list exists through such an arrangement.

Yes, I agree. Once you've been through the pain of setting up mailman,
you may as well use it ;)

> If there is ever a GNOME-UK list helped by AFFS would not this serve the
> purpose of publicising AFFS more than 'suck people away'?

Oh, probably not. The "sucking away" was specifically addressed at a
potential affs-discuss list: I don't see that list could have any
charter which didn't overlap severely with FSFE-UK. There will be times
when we just want to discuss AFFS itself, but I don't think there would
ever be enough traffic to warrant a whole list. 

As you noted, there are other groups who are doing different things
(like debian-uk) and therefore do have their own lists. I wasn't arguing
that situation was bad; I was arguing more about duplication of what we
already have.

> Yes I too exchanged mails with Telsa recently and what I understood was
> there is a crowd  and willingness but nothing is being done due to the
> possible administrative overheads. 
> 
> This is about a mailing list and if AFFS is starting to run Mailman, I
> do not see why we should not explore this?

No, go ahead. I personally don't really see a problem with doing that -
if they want a list and can't get one anywhere else. I would have
thought they would be more at home on lists.gnome.org though.

Cheers,

Alex.