[Linux-aus] LUGs

[Russell Stuart]

On 7/7/23 13:52, Craige McWhirter via linux-aus wrote:
 > Last time I was in Sydney there were more niche meetups than you could
 > possibly attend and the SLUG team like many LUGS have struggled for
 > about a decade with the questions "Where do we fit in? What do we do?"
 > - as has Linux Australia itself.

I suspect you are right that the professionalisation of open source is 
partially responsible for driving down LUG membership. But I don't think 
it relates to LA.

Speaking for myself, the answer to "Where do we fit in? What do we do?" 
for Linux Australia has always been fairly clear. LA fosters Open Source 
in the antipodes by funding conferences.

LA does other things involving open source like providing infrastructure 
(bank account, insurance) to open source projects, some funding and 
helping LUGS. However that only happens as a consequence of auspicing 
successful conferences. So while important, those things aren't the 
answer to "Where does LA fit in"?

It's true the conferences have gone through a rough trot in the past 
couple of years, but I doubt professionalisation of open source was the 
reason. That rough trot was caused primarily by COVID. Perhaps less 
desire for in-person meetups now a lot can be done online is also a 
cause, but it's evident a lot of people still like (need?) to meet 
personally and chat to a like minded friendly face occasionally - and 
besides open source has always done most of its work online.

There has been a changing of the guard. The Linux kernel is mostly done 
now, as in there isn't a lot of new activity happening there. Wireguard 
is nice, it's interesting to watch eBPF and io_uring evolve to allow the 
kernel to execute user space programs in some limited form - but it's 
nothing like the pace it once was. Instead we have Rust, AI, exploring 
approaches to virtualisation (docker/LXC, k8s, qemu), and most 
interestingly to me figuring out how to make ourselves both private and 
secure (Passkey, confidential computing).

As always, a lot of the plumbing under the hood in these fields is being 
done as open source projects. As an example, Meta's generous release of 
LLaMA has allowed open source tinkers to produce numerous novel toys 
(like running it on a Raspberry PI) which the big corps were not 
interested in doing. As a result, open source will probably develop AI 
models and code the rest of us use - just like it did with compilers, 
OS's and desktops.

I'm hoping those new areas of activity will start running their own 
Australian and NZ conferences. When they do, they can come to LA for 
funding, infrastructure, and a place to get in contact with a pool of 
people who have done it before.

I also fervently hope the "Linux" in our name doesn't dissuade them. We 
have been focused on "Open Source" as opposed to just "Linux" for 
decades now. It's likely everyone reading this knows that of course - 
but I'm not sure the young graduates attending the specialist meetups 
are aware of it.