[Noisebridge-discuss] Virtualization resources

[Kragen Javier Sitaker]

On Tue, Jun 02, 2009 at 04:09:17PM -0700, Josh Myer wrote:
> If we can make things as reliable, restorable, and trivial to use as
> other resources, I'd be glad to use them.  Until then, I'm likely to
> continue farming out my projects to external providers, as it's less
> overhead and lower risk.

If you can't open it, you don't own it.  This is not a business
discussion where terms like "overhead" and "risk" rule; this is a hacker
evangelism issue.  It's about making the world more hackable.

> Noisebridge is an infrastructure provider, but it's best to focus on
> our strongest points and outsource the rest.

Noisebridge is a group of friends who are building cool stuff.  If
someone wants to build some kind of service everyone can use, that's
great, and totally in the hacker spirit.  It's not *about* reducing
overhead and managing risk and focusing on core competencies and
outsourcing.  Those concepts assume a kind of fungibility of people's
time that doesn't exist, a kind of central management authority that
doesn't exist, and a value system based on profitability that isn't
applicable.

> For perspective: the noisebridge calendar.  A friend wanted to know
> when the space was going to be full of people, so I set it up for her.
> ... and there are almost a dozen people who can maintain the thing in
> full: add new admins, etc.

That's awesome, but surely you can see that there are entirely
non-monetary reasons that it would be even more awesome if it were
actually owned by NB and therefore hackable and not beholden to a
trusted third party.  The issues are more or less the same as with free
vs. proprietary software, only slightly more so, so if you don't care
about that I wouldn't expect you to care about this; but maybe you can
accept that some people do, and there's a possibility that it's not
because we're insane.

It's a real shame that it takes more work to set up a calendar system we
own than it does to set up a Google Calendar, and that's a big
infrastructural problem we ought to find a way to solve.  Apt-get goes
a long way toward solving it for some kinds of software but obviously
not for MediaWiki calendar plugins.

Kragen