[luau] IMPORTANT - Upcoming List Policy

[MonMotha]

cpaul at telemetrybox.org wrote:
>>With the Linux for Schools project successfully underway, more and more
>>educators and non-techies are joining this mailing list.  The
>>self-censorship that MonMotha mentioned would be ideal, and possibly
>>crucial, to keep these people interested in the Open Source community. 
>>Wouldn't they rather trust a group of individuals who can express their
>>ideas and opinions eloquently? 
> 
> 
> I will not support efforts to water down geek culture for the sake of keeping appearances with the bourgeois.  Tactically speaking, an informal prohibition against some of the 'baser' elements of geek language and culture might be a good way to attract and retain total newbies.  
> 

Agreed.  Subtle and humorous MS bashing is a big part of being in the 
Linux crowd.  It should be continued.

However, mindless zealotism is bad, on both sides of the fence.  The OSS 
people need to watch their M$ (see, there it is) bashing to make sure it 
doesn't cross the line from funny or subtle to flat out trolling.  The 
Windows advocates, who do have some good points, need to do the same. 
This applies to basically any "holy war" (vi vs. emacs, KDE vs. GNOME, etc).

> Strategically however, it will be a bad move.
> 
> Geek culture and jargon are a part of our identity as hackers -- we should never allow our language and actions to be constrained within a set of words and behaviours deemed acceptable by some close-minded suits (And at the same token, we shouldn't force the newbies to speak our language).  
> 

Agreed.  Gotta love everything2's jargon database.

> A starched list of self-censored emails will end up as being repellant to geeks who have already been exposed to the global Free Software hacking culture.  This may or may not seem trivial - but I feel that this is an important fact that needs to be taken into consideration.  I, for one, know that a young geek would rather spend time communicating about hackish things and plugging into a rad international community, than immersing themselves into a business-friendly medium with imperatives to increase market share for a certain category of software 'products'.  
> 
I don't think that's what the idea is.  The idea for the 
"self-censorship" is to make sure we don't post blatant trolls or 
inflamatory comments.  Nobody likes to page through archives only to see 
bunches of trolls and mindless zealotism.

This isn't to say that this is a big problem on the list.  Occasionally 
it happens, but that's definately not the norm on this list.  Hopefully 
we can keep it that way.

> 
> It's about being understanding and open-minded.  And if new list-members can't fight the mind-fuck and broaden their horizons to accept another culture's idiosyncrasies, they might need to be subscribed elsewhere.
> 

By the same token, you don't want to "scare off" the newbies.

> We have mailman, it's not that hard to add another list.
> 
> 
> Mahalo and thanks for the thoughtful response,
> charles

--MonMotha

P.S. Good to see another person who uses PGP :) I've been using it to 
sign my firewalls for a while, but just recently got around to setting 
up Enigmail to use it with mail.
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