I am a member in good standing, and this is a member inititative. I propose that we grant all official staff members free memberships in Cyberspace, Inc. for as long as they hold their positions. Again, we'll need six people to endorse this proposal before we can vote on it. I, of course, endorse.42 responses total.
My reasoning here is that there shouldn't be people who work as hard as staff does and yet don't have memberships. There's currently at least one staff member in that position.
i vote yez
As "at least one staff" person who is not a member -- I suggest that it's unnecessary to confer automatic memberships on staff and in some circumstances may actually be helpful to have staff people whose regular logins are not members in the staff group, as it makes it possible for them to spot file permission problems that might not be obvious to those with greater permission group membership.
I think staff can create pseudos and decide which are the members and which aren't. That way they can vote in elections and hold office if they wish.
Re. 3: Perhaps we could make it the decision of the staffer whether they get a membership, and as nharmon suggests, which account of theirs gets it. The new wording of the proposal is as follows: All staff members of Grex may, at their option, be granted a free membership in Cyberspace, Inc. for as long as they remain on staff. Any staff member receiving a free membership may choose which of their accounts the membership belongs to.
I 2nd scholar's proposal
I am not a member, can I endorse scholar's proposal? If I can, I do.
Only endorsements from members count toward the total needed to vote.
I'm not sure how I'd vote on the proposal, but I think it ought to go to a member vote.
Being one such staff member, there is not a lot that I can't do now that I would like to do from Grex given I was a member.
If I thought this would get us more, or more active, staff members, I'd be for it. But the point of having members pay dues, is that Grex needs money to pay its bills to keep running. Giving out free memberships reduces that income. But it's true that our scarcest resource at the moment is staff committment. Is there anyone out there who would commit more time to Grex staff work if Grex gave them a complimentary membership in return? One problem that would need to be worked out, to implement this proposal, is to delimit the time when people are "on staff". As it is, people tend to be officially "on staff", in the sense of having root access, long after they stop actively doing things on Grex.
I've considered those problems, but I really don't think they'd have much of an effect on Cyberspace's income; people are on staff because they care about Grex. In my estimation, if this proposal passes, it won't be used to 'stiff' Grex, but will be a decent thing to do in return for the work staff does for us -- regardless of whether or not it results in increased work or not.
If Grex moved to a more modern, flexible operating system you may see more staff members interested. There are no guarantees, however! The fact that OpenBSD was pushed for its 'security hardness' has strained the interest of at least a few current and former staff members. And, given that, we have seen it has hardly proven a fortress either! Being a security expert, I can tell you for a fact that most security issues are the result of poor configuration and lack of diligent maintenance/monitoring --- something we have been lacking. OpenBSD (and its push by a couple of former/current staff memebers) has lost not only the interest of others in terms of participation, but also limited our software base and chance of modernisation.
<remmers dons his voteadm hat> Since this is an official proposal item, I direct your attention to Article 5 of the bylaws, posted at http://cyberspace.org/local/grex/bylaws.html . (Note: The version of the bylaws in item 2 of this conference is not up-to-date with respect to voting procedures.) The rules are: There's a discussion period of at least two weeks. At least 10% of the membership must endorse bringing the proposal to a vote by so indicating in this item. After two weeks, but not more than 30 days, have elapsed, the proposer may post a final wording of the proposal. Members have 48 hours thereafter to add or withdraw endorsements. If the proposal has the necessary number of endorsements 48 hours after the author posts a final wording and requests a vote, it goes to an online vote via secret ballot. If the author doesn't request a vote or the necessary number of endorsements isn't obtained within 30 days of the posting of this item, the proposal lapses and is not eligible to be voted on. This proposal item was posted on September 1, so discussion extends at least through September 14 and will either come to a vote or lapse no later than September 30. Assuming that the online member list is up to date, there are 53 members; hence 6 member endorsements are required to bring this to a vote. I count 3 so far: scholar, tod, kingjon. <remmers removes voteadm hat>
Re #13: That is an absurd statement. Please start a new item in Garage or coop, detailing your reasons giving your thoughts. I want to hear them in detail.
Why is it absurd? It's been discussed numerous times, Steve.
re 15 Thank you for that blanket statement, steVE. Really.
It's being "discussed" doesn't alter the fact that its absurd Dan. But I'd like to have an item where the anti-OpenBSD philosophy side of things can be explained. Starting with that it isn't "modern"... However, that all I want to say here about it. I'm hoping Mic creates an item soon.
You will be hoping for a long time.
Well thats nice.
Who's Mic?
Regarding #18; That you say it's absurd doesn't make it so. And don't misconstrue the idea that OpenBSD isn't appropriate for grex as an "anti-OpenBSD philosophy." You have a tendancy to take technical disagreements as some sort of personal attack when they aren't, and I really don't understand why.
*I* do? Hmmm.
Well, that's my impression, yes.
Dan's right (that is my impression also). OpenBSD is a relatively stable, cutdown OS -- however, I would not use it for anything other than for a bastion host firewall. For building conferencing systems and/or systems offering services of any type, there are much more appropriate (and most importantly flexible/configurable/customisable) alternatives.
Re #24, #25: It's not my impression. I've expressed disagreements with STeve from time to time, and have seen others do so in various meetings, but have yet to see him take it personally. A look at the heading reminds me that this item is about free memberships for staffers. I think it's a bad idea. It might be reasonable to give staffers who need it outbound internet access however, even though that's a perk normally restricted to members.
We have in fact done that in the past for staffers who needed to test internet services.
John, why do you think it is a bad idea?
Regarding #26; I've never meet Steve in real life, so I can't *really* say (a lot of grexers who think I'm crusty would be - I think - pleasantly surprised to meet me in real life. A lot of the impression one gives online revolves around written communication styles, but a lot of human interaction is lost in writing). But I digress.... I see Steve as very quick, and I would go so far as to say too quick, to step in and speak up for things he's pushed. Like OpenBSD. It's like he feels that he has a personal stake in it.
He may be quick, but I doubt that he's very fast. :(
Fat's the truth.
My impression is that STeve has a very protective attitude toward Grex, and probably a deeper understanding of the threats it is faced with on a daily basis than any other user of the system, and that his ideas of an appropriate OS for Grex center around what is most likely to keep Grex functioning and available for the users for the largest proportion of time in the face of those threats. Frankly, all the flexibility and softfware base we want won't do any good if system downtime goes up to the point where no one can use it anyway. And as for free memberships for staff (rememeber? the actual TOPIC of this item...), there is no reason I can think of that this would be a valuable change to make. Staff have easy access to all the benefits of membership, and the requirements of membership (id verification, evidence of some commitement to the idea of supporting Grex) are useful indicators of the potential of an individual to be a responsible contributor to the system rather than a powerful abuser. (At this point, I suspect some people will bring up Valerie as a counterpoint, so I'll say that though I do not approve of what she did when she left, her contributions up to that point were undeniable and significant.)
re #32 I don't dispute the intentions of staff. I do question the lack of interest and respect given to fresh volunteers, though.
It's a thankless job, and no non-financial compensation can really change that. In addition, selecting people to entrust to manage the system is a really daunting challenge. The system lies or dies on the good will of the user base and a bad choice can have really damaging effects. We're not a large enough player in the internet world to attract people for prestige reasons, and our complete non-commerciality limits the resources we have available to lure good people by other means. The status quo may not be ideal, but there just aren't many options available, especially without compromising some fundamental aspect of Grex's present character.
I think the status quo *is* the problem. People aren't motivated to join staff because it's perceived (rightfully so) as elitist and cliche-ish, with certain members being "chosen" over certain others. That said, I'd work on staff again if needed, but I really think grex needs to do a better job of self-promotion and changing its image to attract new blood.
No Dan, I really don't think I have a "personal" stake in the usage of OpenBSD, but Eric is quite right that I feel protective of Grex. I see and deal with the vandals that attack the system, and while I have said before that I think FreeBSD is a very good operating system, I feel that OpenBSD offers more in terms of security. Thanks Eric for your comments.
Could you expand on that, Steve? Hopefully in some sort of quantifiable manner? Is that just your intuition, or do you have data to back that up? I saw many of the script kiddies who tried to crack grex's security, too. Some of them were successful (the tty attack). I don't think that would have worked under FreeBSD, but it certainly did on OpenBSD. Did anyone ever investigate *where* that attack came from? Can you conceed that another system might handle things better, and if not, why not?
That last question can't be answered completely and you know it. If some horrid new problem was discovered in OpenBSD and not the other BSDs then we could have a problem. As for the specifics of the tty problem, I'm not sure about Free/NetBSD either--it definitely was a problem here and I should still look into that more. I could reverse the question at the beginning of your post and ask you why OpenBSD is *less* secure. Not less good in terms of things that you've mentioned (smp support, kernel threads, ...), but in specific terms of security. We're getting into philosphy here, and I'm not certain that anything I say is going to have any effect your thoughts, at all, and take time that I could be spending on other grex stuff. But I'm a sucker and will probably try to come up with stuff as I can (taking a break at work at the moment).
I think that OpenBSD and FreeBSD are roughly comparable in terms of security. Certainly, OpenBSD is better at self-promotion in this regard, but that's just promotion, and may or may not reflect reality. I would posit that OpenBSD's tendancy to be less reliable makes it less appropriate for grex, versus OpenBSD that is used in this sort of environment more often (there were a number of BBS's in China running on FreeBSD: thousands of interactive users using them at a time). I'd say that being less reliable really is being less secure in a way. My data is that grex has crashed multiple times due to bugs in OpenBSD, the tty problem, the attacks against the system logger, and other things just not working as advertised.
<remmers dons voteadm hat> The minimum two-week discussion period for this proposal has passed, so scholar may post final wording anytime and request a vote anytime between now and September 30. To be voted on, at least 10% of the membership (= 6 members at current levels) must within 48 hours after such posting endorse bringing the proposal to a vote. If I counted correctly, there are 3 endorsements at this time. <hat off>
<scholar dons proposer hat> Here's the final proposal: All staff members of Grex may, at their option, be granted a free membership in Cyberspace, Inc. for as long as they remain on staff. Any staff member receiving a free membership may choose which of their accounts the membership belongs to. The formatting is a bit crummy, but I'd like to see three more people endorse bringing this to vote so we can see what the membership thinks of it. <hat off>
silly hats only, please
You have several choices: