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response 313 of 357:
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Jul 11 16:03 UTC 2010 |
Wow, you guys sure do write a lot while I'm gone.
A few short notes (I don't have a lot of time right now to get too deep
into the weeds. Such is life for me at the moment; at least no one has
been able to kill me yet, though they've certainly tried).
First, regarding the valerie issue. valerie mates wrote a script that
deleted all of her posts in almost every Grex conference, save staff and
maybe coop. She then used root privileges to delete her `baby diary'
items in the parenting conference, though to my knowledge, she didn't
delete anything else there. Grex staff was urged to restore those
posts, but did not. As soon as it became apparent that staff would not
restore the baby diary items, John Perry requested his divorce item to
be deleted, and it was by Grex staff (I do not believe this was done by
valerie mates, who, I *think* had revoked her own root access by then,
but maybe I am wrong). It was requested that that, too, be restored but
again, Grex staff declined. This then led to a series of member votes
aimed at restoring the items, none of which were passed, and the number
and frequency of such votes then led to a proposal that a certain
percentage of grex's members would have to back a proposal before it
could be brought to vote by the general membership, which passed and
became grex policy.
As I recall, both Mary and John Remmers were vehemently opposed to the
deletion of the baby diary and divorce items and both lobbied hard to
get them restored.
The facts of this are, simply, that Grex --- as a whole and as a
community --- compromised its free speech ethic here by supporting
censorship. It really cannot be spun any other way. Was it democratic?
Yes. But does that make it any less censorship? No. It just meant
that the community democratically decided to censor itself. I think
it's sad, and that it has permanently diminished Grex's claim to freedom
of speech, but in the end, it's what the community wanted.
Anyway, I just wanted to set the record straight on that.
The idea of a second system sounds interesting, but I'm not sure it will
do anything other than dilute the already existing one. That said,
there might be a way to do both....
In order to explain that, though, one must ask the question, "What is
Grex?" Some say it's a community, but it's more than that, really.
It's the union of the users who use it, the system itself (including the
software that runs it) and the activities of those users on that
system. Consider this: the Grex community could move to any other
conferencing system, but has not. Why not? Because that wouldn't be
Grex. So there is something to be said for continuity in the technical
sense, since that is part of the definition of the community. That is,
the community is defined, at least in part, by the system it exists on.
For proof, bear in mind that we actually lost a lot of users when we
moved from the Sun to the current Grex machine (which was called
`NextGrex': That is, the new hardware and the move to OpenBSD was the
NextGrex project, not a re-invention of Grex as a system).
Now, in this, I'll say that I think the hardware is more or less
irrelevant at this point. We're running on x86 gear and will continue
to do so probably until Grex ceases to exist. There's just nothing else
out there that's viable to move to. So that part can be futzed with at
will. The software, however, is much more integral to what Grex really
is. People, for whatever odd reason, tend to get emotionally attached
to software (be it operating systems, programming languages, or
particular programs written in those languages and running on those
operating systems). I get a sense of nostalgia whenever I use VMS or an
older version of Unix or an IBM mainframe because that's what I "grew
up" on, so to speak. Software has a much greater attachment than
hardware for most people, and the Grex community is no different.
Witness how many *years* it took to retire the PicoSpan program, despite
having superior alternatives available. There's still some nostalgia
for that, I'm quite sure.
But here's the thing about software that, I think, is both interesting
and relevant to the present discussion: software is *malleable*. It can
be modified and shaped to be, essentially, whatever one would like.
Why is this relevant? Well, Grex is now running on all open-source
software; there is nothing here that we don't have the source code to,
and the only thing I think there's any question about whether we have
the right to modify is the "gate" program, because it's not clear what
license Jan Wolter applied to it when he wrote it. Since it's available
for download from his web site, I'd guess it's implicit that we can
modify it as we see fit, but I really don't know if that's true or not,
and I'm not a lawyer. I sent him email asking him about it some time
ago (because we made a local change to support job control under
fronttalk on OpenBSD), but he never responded. I doubt he cares, but
perhaps someone who knows him better could ask....
Anyway, as I was saying, software is malleable. Meaning that it can be
molded to be, essentially, whatever someone would like. All it takes is
time and energy put into the software itself. If Grex would like to
put a modern face on itself, then there's no reason it cannot do so and
yet retain compatibility with the retro feel that some value so dearly.
All it would take to do that would be some effort put into the
software itself. In many ways, this is exactly what fronttalk is: a
retro frontend to backtalk, which is a web-based conferencing system.
If people want to extend the system in various ways, it's certainly
*possible* to do so: just mold the software to be what people want. The
thing that's lacking here is time, energy, and people.
About a year ago, I wanted to do a lot of this kind of work, but, well,
then I found out I'd be in Afghanistan, and here I am: typing this while
leaning up against the side of a tent in Helmand Province, a 9mm
handgun strapped to my hip with a couple of (loaded) magazines in case
the base gets overrun. I'm afraid I'm hardly in a position to invest
lots of effort into re-working Grex's software for at least another few
months (and if I take one through the running lights, then forever).
That's just the way it is.
So I think that, perhaps, a good question to ask is *why* Grex isn't
attracting the type of people who would be interested in doing that sort
of thing? The answer to that is going to be a lot more illuminating,
and I suspect that, in part, it has to do with the nature of the
community itself. People have drifted away, but few people ever ask
why. There's lots of speculation, but no one has polled those people to
really get a feel for why they've moved on. For instance, has anyone
thought to poll people like Marcus Watts, or even Steve Andre? Sure,
the latter logs on, but only sporadically and he rarely participates in
the BBS.
Anyway, I guess the point is this: recreating Grex doesn't require
throwing away the existing system; it just requires another layer of
abstraction. Both can coexist happily on the same host.
Actually, that's something that's sort of always intrigued me: the idea
of multiple communities existing within the same physical (or virtual)
space. I've thought about this quite a bit, and I know I've mentioned
it here before (my "community of communities" idea); this grows out of a
social observation I've made living in the physical world, that in any
given physical space, there exist many, largely independent communities.
Look around you sometime and you'll probably see what I mean; people
with different friends and interests who comprise one community living
next to another group, or hanging in some space that used by other such
groups. Why couldn't Grex be that for virtual communities? Personally,
I wish it was more of a draw for hacker types who are interested in
neat technology stuff. I see SDF as being something like that, and
wonder why we're different. I suspect that, at least in part,
historically the Grex community has been so focused on making *one*
coherent community versus fostering many using different software, etc,
on the same machine. This is what many people think is meant when Grex
says something like, "we're a conferencing system" versus, "we're a
public access Unix system" or just, "we're a public system." Even the
name implies a singular community.
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