an IT strategy that can be replicated

[Daniel Pocock]

On 24/05/16 07:15, Florian Snow wrote:
> Hi Daniel,
> 
> Thank you for your suggestions.  I appreciate your enthusiasm and I will
> certainly keep your suggestions in mind when implementing anything.
> 
> 
> Daniel Pocock <daniel at pocock.pro> writes:
>> How do other people feel about that point?
>>
>> FSFE's "About" page says the organization's mission is to empower
>> users.  Personally, I feel that setting an example that other
>> organizations can replicate will help achieve that goal and doing
>> things that other people can easily copy is a powerful form of
>> leadership.
> 
> Well, the statement is a political statement.  That does not mean, the
> FSFE will enable everyone personally by providing software to them, but
> rather that the FSFE wants to get to the point where using Free Software
> is the norm.  Part of that strategy can be what you mentioned, but the
> FSFE is not a technical organization; it is a political and educational
> organization about technology.
> 
> 
> I think many of your suggestions make sense and we (the blog hackers)
> and probably others would love to implement some of them.  However, the
> problem is that your suggestions mean a major change from how things are
> currently done.  Your suggestions also mean major work to even just
> achieve these kinds of goals.  We do not have the manpower to do that
> right now and the best thing we can do is look at a system and take
> small steps to making it more maintainable.  Defining service plans and
> deciding which database we want to use or even changing the whole
> infrastrucure setup before we even know what is feasible, is not a good
> idea.
> 
> And to be completely honest here, another reason why your suggestions
> are sometimes a bit problematic is that you are suggesting other people
> implement them.  If they were small or easily implemented changes, that


That is not the case at all and I'm sorry if my style of communication
gave that impression.

Every day there is some contribution I make to improving free software,
sometimes these are things that could be used directly by the
system-hackers or other individual teams, sometimes they are things that
are more abstract.

I'm not suggesting that the system-hackers must immediately drop
everything else and switch to one of these ready-to-run Linux systems,
but the relevance of these systems for small organizations is definitely
worthy of discussion.

Packaging something in Debian or Fedora is usually a prerequisite for
having something in one of these ready-to-run systems, so it is quite
possible that things might evolve in phases:

a) the blog team decides you are keen to support 2 or 3 Wordpress
plugins or you decide on a particular static hosting solution with a
web-based editing tool for pages stored in Git.  Maybe you try them on
the system for a few weeks or months without packaging them.

b) volunteers (possibly from within the team or other FSFE members) help
package those things as .deb files and maybe they are kept in a local
APT repository for FSFE servers

c) those packages are submitted at mentors.debian.net and eventually
uploaded into Debian and other organizations can use them too (and also
contribute to them, blog about using them, etc)

d) those packages become available in one of those ready-to-run
solutions mentioned already, like TurnKey Linux or ClearOS

e) at some point, the system-hackers decide they may want to use the
packaged version of the software as it is no longer necessary to keep a
version in the local APT repository

f) and maybe they reach a point where they feel one of these
ready-to-run solutions meets their needs too

So, it starts off with the blog team evaluating and choosing things, but
with the long term view that those things can be supported as part of a
distribution.

Other people, including myself, may get involved in any of those steps
without necessarily being involved at every step.

Regards,

Daniel