[svlug] Ubuntu 10.04 Installfest at Noisebridge (San Francisco), Sunday May 30th, 11-5

[Robert Hajime Lanning]

Rick Moen wrote:
> I think there's nothing preventing volunteers from the Linux community 
> from properly reflecting the diversity, range, and choice that is our
> inheritance.

But it is their choice.  They are volunteers. They are not being paid by
any lobbyist or corp. They are putting it on because of their 
loyalty/fandom/what have you.  It is celebrating a specific event for a 
specific distro.

> Can we be realistic for a moment?  I've seen what Canonical Ltd.
> provides in the way of infrastructure to its 'teams'.  It's really 
> for all intents and purposes a zero-money deal for everyone but the very
> few on the corporate payroll, and that's certainly not Grant, etc., who
> to the contrary are generous and (necessarily) self-reliant volunteers.

Of course we can be realistic.  I have always been. I never said they 
were getting paid for their loyalties.  We have always been talking 
about the volunteers, right?  It's an organized fan base. Granted, 
Cononical gets a free ride.

> And, y'know, Robert, I don't mind at all that both you and Bill Ward are
> among those who will, almost without fail, instinctively and immediately
> post the opposite viewpoint to pretty much anything I write here.  It's
> just one of those droll Internet things.  As I like to say, I have only
> to say 'I like herring' on the Internet, and can instantly summon every
> herring-hater for a thousand miles by merely doing that.  It's like
> magic.

I actually don't really know why that is.  Maybe it just seem like some 
of what you put out here, comes off like an attack.  I seem to have an 
automatic response to that tone.  (Yes, sometimes to my detriment.)

Maybe instead of "You are volunteers, you should know better." type of 
post, it should have been "Will there be other distros available?"

If the response is "no," then you could ask, "would you like some other 
selections to be available? I can help..."

I would have had no reaction to that.

> What I actually find annoying is rhetorical cheap tricks like:
> 
> Robert Hajime Lanning>  You didn't read _who_ was putting on the
>                         installfest.
> 
>   (Ah, thank you for the solution.  Solely a vision problem,
>   then, and we can ignore everything else I said.)

I am sorry.  I honestly thought you missed the point that one of the 
organizations putting on the installfest was specifically an Ubuntu one.

Since you were attacking the fact that they were promoting Ubuntu only.

I have a habit of pointing people back to source material when I believe 
all pertinent information is contained there.

> Bill Ward>  My guess is the people putting it on are enthusiastic about
>             Ubuntu - what's wrong with that?
> 
>   (Boy, he sure told _me_, right?  That'll teach me to post that it's
>   Bad and Wrong to be enthusiastic about Ubuntu.)
> 
> This business of ignoring what I said and attempting to sidetrack
> onto something else is pretty tedious.  It'd be nice to get those 
> two minutes back, really.

I am sorry about all the miss communication...  I read your original 
post as "Why are you promoting Ubuntu?  You should be promoting 
everything else."

The event was thought out to be an Ubuntu Installfest.  Not a put an OS 
on your computer installfest.  We have two of those a month, as you have 
pointed out. (Thanks by the way. I do know a lot of work goes into 
supporting those events.)

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       --MCP