Hmmm. Maybe people are having a hard time getting motivated about this whole ``UNIX'' thing. Maybe if we changed the club name to something that people might actually recognize; you know, something that is regularly in the mainstream press, something new and cool, something for which large corporations are spending millions of dollars in advertising revenues on national television, like ... uh, well, Linux.
I *guarantee* you that if the Daily Universe were to run a story on
the newly reorganized ``BYU Linux Users Group'' that it would get a
nice infusion of motivated members, to do stuff like booths and
install fests. They run stories on new groups on campus all the time
(anyone remember the 100% Modest Belly Dancing Club?)
UNIX used to be about community, back in the late 70's and early
80's. ``Proprietarization'' of UNIX did much to kill that community
spirit as various organization closed up all the code and
commercialized the heck out of it. Richard Stallman recognized the
root of the problem and attacked it by forming the Free Software
Foundation in an attempt to preserve that community. He made the GPL
and doggedly stuck to his values. Eventually, the Linux kernel came
along and, together with the GNU (GNU is Not UNIX) tools, this hacker
community sprang back to life in a way that very few people
anticipated (I admit that I'm glazing over the whole BSD thing too,
which deserves better mention than I feel I can give it, but GNU is
admittedly bigger and more influential today).
UNIX is now a proprietary relic of an earth-scorched past. The
worldwide community has since regrouped about the license and the
software that is amenable to cooporation, sharing, and mutual
benefit. The hacker ethic lives on in GNU, BSD, and Linux. It
doesn't make much sense any more to have a ``UNIX Users Group'';
that's almost an oxymoron.
I'm not around any more, so I suppose I can't say a lot about it; I
can only offer my opinion on the matter (again). If the group prefers
to keep the image of an esoteric group of old fogey computer nerds
doing its own thing, then by all means don't bother changing the name.
Just don't be surprised when you find difficulty attracting new
blood.
Mike
P.S. - These comments are my own and not my employer's.
On Tue, Sep 09, 2003 at 12:08:15PM -0600, Evan McNabb wrote:
<lamantations about the old guys moving on and the new guys dragging
their feet>
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Michael Halcrow | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Developer, IBM Linux Technology Center |
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What's another word for synonym? |
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