[Officers] Re: [Speakers] Speaker for SVLUG

[Heather Stern]

On Thu, Jan 23, 2003 at 03:41:35PM +0800, Marc MERLIN wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 17, 2003 at 09:31:48PM -0800, Marika wrote:
> > Hi Steve,
> > 
> > A few years ago Richard Stallman came to SVLUG and spoke.  It seems like 
> > the numbers at the meetings really jumped after he came.  Besides that 
> 
> Not really, no, we had good numbers before he came.
> The jump from 40-50 people to 200-500 was after Linus came and after we
> moved to the great cisco location we've now been at for about 5 years.
 
I object;  this was around the time that I joined.

There was a surge from averaging 40 (fit neatly in the Carl's Jr) to
around 70 (does not really fit there) and we quickly sought a bigger
host.

I was there when Hans Reiser was speaking; probably the first one Linus
attended, and he made considerable effort to not get noticed so he could
get to hear Hans' talk.  At that one the room was stuffed to overflowing
(~70, 75 people) and the mutter among the crowd was this was too many 
months in a row to be cramped like this.  

We had another surge from ~150 regularly to ~400 later;  since then it 
has fluctuated but never dreamed of fitting back in the Carl's anteroom.

The surge to 150-200 attendees cna be directly attributed to the
hostspace actually having room for it.  The later surge (and
fluctuations afterwards) can be attributed to Linux' own surge in
the local computing industry.   We do get a few more people when we
get a wildly famous speaker.  We've had several and it's all a blit on
the meter.

> > it was just great to hear from one the guys that started it all.  Any 
> > chance, you could get him to come back again and give us a report on how 
> > Linux/open source has grown and where it's going in the future?
 
RMS has much stricter criteria about coming to speak at places than he 
used to.

He may well feel that he needs to speak to the unconverted, not the
people who actually understand.

> This is just my personal opinion, and not a veto from the vice
> president:
> - We paid for stallman to come over (we went around a passed a hat
>   basically)
> - Stallman was his rude, insensitive self, and started by trying to
>   rewrite our banner to say SVGLUG and giving us his ever so tiring
>   speed about why we should all say GNU/Linux and why he deserves credit
>   (which he does deserve, but you sure don't ask for it that way)
> - He later boycotted whatever restaurant we went to back then because he
>   didn't feel like going there, and had people drive him elsewhere.
> 
> If other people want to see him again, fine, but I'm sure not going to
> throw another $20 in a hat to pay for his flight...
> I'd also like to re-iterate that SVLUG owes pretty much nothing to
> Stallman, especially not attendance.

SVLUG began its existence as a UNIX special interest group long before 
Linux was interesting.  There were a lot of flavors, for a short while.
We owe easily as much to the folks who beat X into usable shape, or the
BSD students throughout the years who made AT&T UNIX bearable.  Renaming
to SVLUG came later.

Linux may owe quite a bit to Stallman - but also to these others.

  . | .   Heather Stern
--->*<--- Starshine Technical Services
  ' | `   SVLUG Web Content Coordinator