[conspire] Penguin Day - Demysitify FLOSS for Nonprofits

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Christian Einfeldt (einfeldt at earthlink.net):

> In fact, Rick or whoever else is a tribal elder here, I would like 
> to know if I should NOT post a link for articles that I am writing 
> for MP.  They generally are of interest to folks on this list.  I 
> haven't done it in the past, simply because I didn't want to appear 
> self-promoting.  

Hey, if you aren't willing to toot your horn, who'd toot it for you?  ;->


Seriously, though (and I know there's good reason to post pointers to
interesting articles, even if one happens to be the author), I trust to
everyone here to exercise reasonable judgement about what to post and
what not to 

I have Mailman set up the lazy-admin way, in which the list's completely
public, subscribers aren't prevented from doing anything they want, and
nobody has to live in a mommy state.  I've never acted to curtail
anything but literal spam, plus there's a non-enforced request that job
posting be sent via the listadmin.

The fact that you're asking just means that you're a prince of courtesy,
Christian, and I appreciate it -- but you don't have to ask.  Post
whatever you think the list would want to see.  If readers think that
you're a great git, they'll be free to tell you.  ;->


On my old dial-up BBS, The Skeptic's Board, which I ran for about eight
years starting in 1986, people kept bugging me to post "policies",
because I seemed to permit anything that wasn't outright illegal.  I
finally yielded and posted one:  "Don't piss off the sysop."  Nobody
ever found a way to get ejected.

I eventually added something like:  "There is no warranty of any kind on
files you download -- except we warrant that any file you successfully
download WILL take up disk space."

And, when one of two people registered using dopey-sounding, juvenile
"handles", I said something like:  "Use a name that sounds real.  I will
never either know or care if it's on your credit cards or government ID,
but if it doesn't look like something you'd write a grocery cheque with,
I'll ask you to change it or explain why not."

That seemed to about cover it:  I was running a board for people
interested in the various discussion areas' topics, out of personal
funds, wasn't catering to script kiddies and related cretins, and
otherwise just played impresario and stayed out of people's hair.

The same attitude tends to apply, here.

(This isn't even supposed to be my user group.  It's supposed to be Mike
Higashi, Doug Lym, and Duncan MacKinnon's, and to meet in San Francisco.
Long story.)