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

[Rafael Carreras]

2007/9/27, Yann <yann.hamon at gmail.com>:

> - Canonical hosting sucks. You have the choice between poor dedicated
> servers or being in canonical's datacenter and stick to 3 or 4 apps.

As it was said, these things are enough for nearly anyone, although I
can see and I suffered from some limitations.

> - 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

That's simply unfair, man.

> 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.

There are a number of things to solve, of course. As a matter of fact,
I cannot understand why two separate booths instead of a bigger one.

> - 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).

Maybe they have a slightly restrictive policy, but all in all it's not so bad.

> - It is hard to get Cds, 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 :)

It's excellent to have some Cds. I dissagree fondly on the "take it,
it's for free" policy. Cds are only for these people who certainly
will use it.

> In the end, what is this mail for? Well, Ubuntufr and Ubuntude have quite
> some money now, and a hosting which is reliable, and being further improved
> to accept more locos. In some time (let's say a couple of months) we will
> probably buy *stuff* (stickers, flyers, posters, shirts, polos, banners,
> [put here whatever you want, it all still need to be discussed], like  more
> than we would need for our own locos, and find a way (logistic company?
> someone with a lot of time? a company supporting ubuntu?) to get them
> distributed among locos, along a yet-to-define process.

I think this is an excellent idea.

> In a medium to far future we may ask canonical for the right to build
> another not-for-profit organisation with ubuntu in its name to separate the
> money dedicated to this project from the money belonging directly to
> ubuntu-fr and ubuntu-de. If we don't get it, well, we may build a not for
> profit without ubuntu in its name :( But with that kind of organisation,

Sorry, I don't understand why that's necessary. :-(

-- 
Rafael Carreras Guillén | gpg.id 2C1AF9C5
http://rcarreras.blogspot.com
Catalan LoCo Team