[Scale-planning] Free Software Representation at SCaLE

Mark Holmquist marktraceur at gmail.com
Wed Jan 25 17:11:59 PST 2012


> You've said this several times now, but you haven't said WHAT you believe
> we've done that favors one part of the community over any other with the
> exception of our name, which we're not going to change 10 years in.

All right, let's not get out of hand, folks. The two messages I received
today had a somewhat less-than-understanding tone, so let me clarify
myself.

I'm not insinuating anything sinister. I'm not even insinuating any
intentional favoritism on the part of....well, anyone! I think that the
mission statement (see previous messages) and various information pages
about the conference happens to demonstrate a preference for one
community over any other. In fact, the CFP [0] only mentions two, so any
other communities might feel excluded from that.

Again, I don't allege any wrongdoing. I just suspect that SCaLE can do
better to make people feel comfortable.

By the way, the lack of "GNU" in the name was among the list of things I
*don't* expect to change right away, because it is viewed as
impractical, and sometimes foolish, by most of the Open Source movement,
who have demonstrably influenced the policy of SCaLE in the past (again,
see the mission statement and the CFP, id.). It joined abandoning
Twitter (which is a nonfree service), removing official iPhone
implementations of information apps, and other similar drastic steps
that, while maybe commonplace for free software-only conferences, would
be very *out* of place, at least currently, for SCaLE.

I want to end this message by saying once again, strongly, decisively,
and summarily that I do _not_ fault _any_ of the people involved with
planning and running SCaLE for _anything_. They have nothing to be
blamed for. I only ask for some discussion of how they can further excel
in making people feel at home. While I once might have been criticizing
the apparent exclusion of Free Software, I think further discussion on
the subject has brought me to realize that there is a simpler and more
neutral way to go about this, and that most claims I might have raised
would have been baseless.

Thanks, all!

[0] https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/cfp/cfp-information

-- 
Mark Holmquist
Student, Computer Science
University of Redlands
MarkTraceur at gmail.com



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