Loco Council, or an alternative idea of what it could be :)

[Alan Pope]

Hi,

On Thu, 2007-09-27 at 14:40 +0100, Yann wrote:
> - Canonical hosting sucks. You have the choice between poor dedicated
> servers or being in canonical's datacenter and stick to 3 or 4 apps. 

It might suck for you, but it doesn't suck for me. Ok, I use an app that
is on the list so I am "lucky", but on top of that I get tonnes of
bandwidth and I get access to some great admins to help me when I need
it.
 
> - As canonical is a company, it works like a "blackbox". The Ubuntu
> Foundation was announced two years ago because "It's important for us
> to distinguish the philanthropic and non-commercial work that is at
> the heart of the Ubuntu project, from the commercial support and
> certification programs that are the focus of Canonical Ltd.", said
> Mark Shuttleworth. Sadly, this never happened, and I got told over and
> over I misunderstood what the foundation was about. I was at the
> linuxtag in germany in 2006, you had a Canonical both called "Ubuntu"
> and a "Ubuntu Community" booth held by the locos. Anyway, if people
> want to fund Ubuntu, how can they now if the money the give to
> canonical is going to be used for ubuntu, or to help improve the
> support company that canonical is? Nothing says that money given to
> canonical will be used for Ubuntu development or Locoteam
> sponsorship. 

I understood the foundation was there for the unlikely occasion that
Mark got bored, Canonical went under, or due to some unforeseen accident
(in space). The foundation would kick in to enable Ubuntu to continue to
be supported whether Canonical is there or not.

> - Ubuntu owns Ubuntu trademarks and copyrights, and therefore uses it
> to build exclusivity contracts for mechandising, for example. Which in
> theory would mean loco would not be able to do ubuntu-related
> merchandising. As it is one of our primary income modes, I find this a
> bit sad. (to be confirmed, though). 

"In theory". The UK LoCo has made Ubuntu branded merchandise and sold it
without issue. Although to be fair it's mostly the activities of one or
two select thoughtful individuals rather than the LoCo as a whole, but
was done under the banner of the team.

> - It is hard to get Cds, 
> 

I personally think we're pretty damned lucky to get the CDs we _do_ get.
I don't know of any other distro that does this. It's a major selling
point, and clearly a drain on resources at Canonical if they churn out
boxes full of CDs to ship everywhere. In my opinion the enduser ordering
single or packs of 5 CDs should be prioritised over a LoCo team having
boxes of them on a shelf for the next event.

You suggest that you're getting offers of donations from companies. Why
not ask them to donate a thousand CDs pressed at a location of your
choosing to your specification?

> it is hard to get these "event boxes". And nobody knows who gets them
> and how this is decided - black box system. The only thing we know is
> they are needed, and if canonical don't produce them anymore, someone
> else has too... and if we have to do it ourselves, it is a lot cheaper
> to produce a lot and then distribute among locos :) 
> 

I don't think anyone is suggesting you _don't_ do that are they?

When Ubuntu-UK had a stand at LinuxWorld Expo last year the materials
were organised by the members of the team, the "only" thing Canonical
provided was the CDs.

> Anyway, there are a couple of issues I am not too happy with (and from
> what I heard some other people share some of my views). You won't
> probably agree with all of these but, well,  I am speaking really only
> for myself here :) 
> 

For the record I disagree.

Cheers,
Al.
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