Engwar

Good bye LKLUG

LKLUG (Lanka Linux User Group) got its life at the Peradeniya University and slowly and steadily gained a loyal and very friendly user base over these years. It used to be a public mailing list just like any other open source community mailing list. The nice thing about open source communities are they’re open to begin with. When you send mail, there is no one to moderate all the mails that comes through. Some people like myself try to stay five miles away from public/open mailing lists that moderate all email they get. Moderation on a public/open (by definition) list is bad because then there are a few people deciding what all the others should read and should not read. Which when you think about it, a stupid thing to do and is acceptable only to cretins.

LKLUG lists have become such a place. Where a handful of people decide what all the community members should read. It has now become an announcement sorta list where you project a certain viewpoint. That is sad. And no matter how hard you try to show people that this is incredibly a bad idea, no one gets it. The other day someone labeled my good bye mail to the list as my “freedom fight”. Sigh.

Don’t get me wrong, I know most of the people in LKLUG and are very good friends. A few group of people think moderation is the right way to go. I disagree. And it’s one reason that I decide to stick to other open lists.

The disturbing fact about this is most of these people are GPL advocates. Been there, done that. But didn’t worked for me. More interestingly they adore this openness in mailing lists too. For some people that’s why it’s so appealing and make it interesting in the first place. “Although it’s the norm for open communities it’s not for us, we must control what people are saying”. This double standard is disturbing. I don’t trust very many people who cannot put money where their mouth is.

The other reason is the LKLUG website. We started so many times to improve things but all that effort is just got wasted. Apparently it’s so hard to grasp the concept of having a CMS with a database to change your site against having a bunch of static HTML files or some system with 9 different markup languages for generating a bunch of static HTML files. So after numerous attempts to convince many people the simple ways of doing things it’s not worth wasting my time anymore.

Last time we almost got a CMS in to the LKLUG site but it was prevented because of a shameful political reason. Why am I shouting about this? Because there are many people ready to devote their valuable time to improve things. People doesn’t realize this golden opportunity.

After having a conversation about the moderation thing it convinced me that this time also there will be no change to the site beside all the effort. I was under the impression that LKLUG comprised of an objective and pragmatic bunch. How naive my thinking has been.

Here’s a gem of a statement from someone I regard in high esteem and got to know through the LUG wrote me privately seeing the recent activity to improve the LKLUG website. He’ll remain anonymous for obvious reasons.

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After being in the list for so many years my observation is that the culture that exists in our universities also exist here. I do not know how it is now, but when I was there what we felt was that most of the so called “Old Crocks” do not let any “Young crock” to do anything new. They all want to do the same old thing that they have been doing 10 years back and hit hard when they see somebody doing something new. That is one of the reasons that many brilliant minds leave the academic world in SL.
…

No one gives a shit about the LKLUG site. And for the people who do give a shit and care about? Silently ignored. My second reason. As my younger sister always say, I need to learn how to give up things when they does not work out. Frankly it is time. I wish LKLUG all the very best.

Posted in lklug · November 7th, 2007 · Comments (1)