[AUUG-Talk]: Re: The future of AUUG (was: So, How was it? [Last AUUG Conference])

[Andrew McRae]

On Fri, 2007-10-19 at 15:52 +1000, Karl Auer wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-10-19 at 15:43 +1000, Conrad Parker wrote:
> > On 19/10/2007, Karl Auer <kauer at biplane.com.au> wrote:
> > > Would Marshall's talk on the
> > > history of FreeBSD have made it into an LA conference programme?
> > 
> > sure, that's well within the scope of LCA.
> 
> That's refreshing - and encouraging.
> 
> Steve spoke of "diehards" on both sides. What reasons would LA have for
> not wanting a merger with AUUG?

AUUG's constituency is wider and more inclusive than LA. AUUG by
tradition and by article aims at any Unix or Open System, e.g AIX or
Solaris (prior to any GPL3 licensing of Solaris), whereas LA
excludes non-GPL systems.

For instance, no presentation can be given at LCA about anything that
isn't available under an Open Source licence (maybe even under a GPL
licence, not sure about that). That effectively means anybody who
wants to talk about something in a non-GPL kernel (or perhaps
a non Open Source kernel), cannot do it at LCA.

In the few discussions I've had casually with LA/LCA folks,
my observation is that LA goes out of their way to reinforce this
distinction, and I think the reasons for this are less to do with the
GPL or other issues, and more cultural. They wanted to clarify their
own identity and position, and this isn't a bad thing of itself, since
Linux clearly was obtaining huge momentum, and LCA was gaining a strong
rep for being a quality conference. More power to them.
I think AUUG didn't do enough to hitch itself to this momentum, (after
all, it was AUUG who had Linus presenting at it well before LCA was
ever conceived) but it isn't clear to me that AUUG could do that without
conflicting it's own stated identity of being more inclusive of
non-Open Source systems.

Of course, now that we're a few years down the track, the spotty
teenager next door has grown up and runs a much bigger shop than
we do, so why should he bother with the old farts? :-)
The inclusivity _was_ important, but is it any more?
Not to him, it seems...

I think that LCA _could_ (if they really wanted) become
more inclusive, and this could potentially mean that some
convergence did occur. I am not sure they really care, since their
own world is big enough.

It reminds me of Americans, and the rest of the world. Most
yanks don't care what's out there, because their own country
is big enough, and to a large extent that is true. However,
for the longer term health of _everyone_ in the world, it would
help a lot for them to get educated about having a world view,
because everyone would then benefit (even themselves).
Cheers,
AMc