[Noisebridge-discuss] Virtualization resources

[Josh Myer]

On Tue, Jun 02, 2009 at 07:46:43PM -0400, Kragen Javier Sitaker wrote:
> 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.
> 

Profitability?  Where is that coming from?  This is about maximizing
awesome, which can be modelled like maximizing profit, but beyond that
isomorphism, they have totally different motivations, mechanisms, and
outcomes.

There's definite fungibility to people's time: I could set up great
infrastructure for noisebridge (I did ops for years).  But that would
chew up all the time I have.  If, instead, I lean on external service
providers, I can focus elsewhere.  For instance, I believe that my
time at noisebridge is far more valuable as a "project manager" making
things happen and organizing people.  I'm not nearly as good a PM as I
am an admin, but I can do it, and it keeps more people more involved
and results in more awesomeness.


> 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.

I've become much more pragmatic, but I still release my personal code
as GPLv2.  I love CC and the EFF, worked at ibiblio, and nearly took
an offer at the Archive (brutal commute...).  I understand and
appreciate free culture, but I also appreciate pragmatism and
accepting the tools you've got at-hand.

In this case, if we really cared about "owning our data," it's as
simple as a cronjob that fetches the vcal file every day.  For the
mailing lists I run elsewhere: I save them into their own maildir as I
read them.  I usually keep my wiki pages on noisebridge, but am a
little twitchy about that (I might set up a cron job to scrape "my"
pages).  As for source code: I'm only using dvcs, so I have complete
repos on my machines, even if my providers go away.  All of this is
zero additional effort from me, and zero setup effort.  I'm as close
to "owning" my data as I can be, short of my providers giving me a
perfect interchange format for backups.  And I don't have the problems
of running my own backups or maintaining my own services, which full
ownership would entail.


> 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.
> 

apt-get install is great and all, but it's only one piece.  apt-get
upgrade is another critical piece, which we'd also need to have.  The
remaining thing missing is configuration and general maintenance,
which package managers handle best when they don't handle it at all.

I'm glad people are gung-ho about Free everything, but, at the end of
the day, I'd rather be creating cool things instead of maintaining
our own copy of otherwise-commodity infrastructure.
-- 
Josh Myer   650.248.3796
  josh at joshisanerd.com