[Noisebridge-discuss] Virtualization resources

[Daniel C. Silverstein]

On Jun 2, 2009, at 4:46 PM, Kragen Javier Sitaker wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 02, 2009 at 04:09:17PM -0700, Josh Myer wrote:
>>
>> 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.

I certainly don't think you're insane, and, indeed I prefer free  
software to proprietary software, but I don't think you're taking into  
account the fact that time is not fungible.  Time spent setting up and  
administering infrastructure is time not spent hacking on projects.  I  
don't want to put words in Josh's mouth, but I suspect that he'd  
rather devote his time to hacking on muralizer than setting up and  
maintaining a git server so he uses a trusted third party such as  
github.  So long as there is a means to pull the data out of the third  
party service, there's no loss of openness; he can always set up his  
own git server at some point in the future.

> 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.

Again, if we can get the data out, which I'm pretty sure we can (vCal,  
CalDAV anyone?), there's nothing shameful about this.  If you'd rather  
see us running on a fully open stack, then by all means, make it  
happen, but please don't knock folks who leverage open third party  
applications to get things done.

				(Dan)