[Linux-aus] Goodbye AUUG, hello phoenix

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Friday, 15 September 2006 at 23:13:29 +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 15, 2006 at 07:38:50PM +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote:
>
>> We're all very comfortable with "Linux" being roughly equivalent to "Open
>> Source". But for a pretty substantial proportion of the FLOSS world, it's an
>> unfortunate conflation. Not insurmountable (for most), but unfortunate.
>
> Greg Lehey wanted to give a talk at linux.conf.au 2002. We said
> "it's got to be something to do with Linux." He said "Fine, I'll
> call it `Why BSD is better than Linux'". We said "Ha! You're
> scheduled for Thursday".

Heh.  In fact, both the topic and the title were Rusty's idea :-) I
would have been too worried about upsetting people without some
support from within the ranks.

The question of BSD coverage is interesting, though.  It's free
software, and it's less different from Linux than one Linux distro is
from another.  Some conferences explicitly included BSD IIRC.

But since I've jumped in to this thread, a couple of thoughts:

> Why change the name when you can have fun with it instead?

I was wondering about something more encompassing (including taking in
what's left of AUUG), and calling the organization "UNIX and Linux Or
Open Source Australia".  But then I thought of the abbreviation.

Seriously, I think there are more important things to think about now.
There are several reasons why a merger would make sense; many have
been around for a while, and I've been gently trying to bring the two
organizations closer together for some years:

- I don't believe that Australia is big enough for two organizations
  which cover so much common ground.
- It confuses the Establishment.  We've heard several times from
  AGIMO, for example, that they'd far rather deal with only one open
  source group.
- It also makes it easier to get sponsors for conferences and things.
- (only now) AUUG no longer seems capable of surviving by itself.

About AUUG: 25 years ago AUUG was what Linux Australia is together, a
group of geeks interested in cool technical stuff.  To quote
http://www.auug.org.au/info/index.html:

   However, Michael Paddon (AUUG President 1994-1998) captured the
   flavour of AUUG better when he described it as, "a bunch of people
   who gather together to talk about the cool stuff they're doing -
   preferably over a beer."

The real differences between AUUG and LA are:

- AUUG is now a bunch of old farts.
- AUUG caters for proprietary UNIX.

This last one is the real issue.  I personally think it's a thing that
a successor organization could handle.  You only need to look at the
conference programmes for the last few years to see that just about
everything has been Open Source.  About the only exception has been
MacOS X.  What do people think of that?

Greg
--
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