[Linux-aus] Candidacy support statement - President

[Hugh Blemings]

Hi Mark, AJ, All,

On 11/01/2016 14:51, Mark Foster wrote:
>
> On 11/01/2016 3:40 p.m., Anthony Towns wrote:
>>> On 10/01/2016 17:29, Anthony Towns wrote: * My work laptop is a
>>> Mac which runs OSX natively and a mixture of FOSS and
>>> proprietary software to do various day to day duties on top **
>>> VMs of Ubuntu for desktop Linux needs and devstack tweaking
>> What desktop Linux needs do you have that you can't (or prefer not
>> to) run natively on OS X? I got the impression most free things
>> were available for OS X, though the updaters weren't as convenient
>> as Debian or Fedora.
>
> Are we seriously at the stage where we're challenging people who're
> putting their hands up to take a not-insigificant role in LA,
> because they use a mixed-software-stack for a variety of reasons?

Ah, there's a bit of context that might be missing here;

Firstly I've known AJ for almost as long as I've done FOSS stuff, he's
one of a number of folk I respect and trust to be good, I dunno,
barometers for me as such matters.

Given that long standing friendship and association I don't view his
email as a challenge in anything other than a good and constructive way :)

To your query AJ - what are the needs that aren't met - it's probably a
mixture of inertia and, I suspect, the fact that for work related
calendaring and email, presently dealt with by an Outlook client run
natively - is unlikely to be seemless in anything else.

I may be doing the FOSS alternatives a disservice here as I've not 
looked at it for a couple of years, but last time I did I put it in the 
mental too hard basket :)

Plus, I must confess - when I wake five minutes prior to a 6am 
conference call, I just want my video conferencing to work - it's 
difficult enough having my hair in some sort of public-compatible shape 
at that hour let alone anything else ;)

> I've been a big contributor to the Linux world in NZ for >15 years,
> but I spend an awful lot of time in Linux (and infact, for various
> reasons, I don't have a 'current' Linux workstation right now,
> though I still have several servers). Do I need to resign from Linux
> Australia now? Or at that level am I only worthy of being a
> 'member'?

No, I don't think this is necessary - I'll leave AJ to speak for himself
but I doubt this was his angle either :)

> I officially joined LA in order to serve on the core team for
> LCA2015 (Auckland); I volunteered a hellovalot of my time and energy
> into what I believe was a very successful LCA. I did an awful lot of
> the planning work for LCA on my (work COE issue) Windows workstation,
> and using my (work COE issue) Apple iPhone. I continue to administer
> the NZ Linux Users Group and participate in groups such as the New
> Zealand Open Source Society on predominantly Windows machines. None
> of these things seemed to matter to the outcome of the event.

And a cracker of an event it was too, I still remember it fondly and as
a credit to all involved :)

>>> Music applications, particularly virtual instruments are very
>>> compute and memory intensive so virtualisation (OSX under Linux
>>> as it would have been) is a non-starter.
>> Hmm, compute-intensive seems surprising; I would've thought the
>> constraint was latency for device access (speakers, mic, midi
>> etc). Isn't compute under VM basically just a few percent worse
>> than native these days? (Well, running OS X under a VM seems to be
>> frowned upon by Apple too from what I can tell)

I think where it fell down is that some of the software I use does funky
things with license management and/or realtime calls that may not play
well with OSX over Linux.

> Play the ball, not the man.  The guy seems to have excellent
> pedigree in terms of the Linux and Open Source worlds and has
> accepted nomination into a challenging and time-consuming volunteer
> role.
>
> Standing for office is so, so much more than splitting hairs and
> interrogating over details like this.

As I noted above, I think AJ is at "worst" gently chiding me but I see
it a well intended topic of discussion :)

Cheers,
Hugh