[NTLUG:Discuss] NTLUG veterans helping Linux newbies?

[Kendall Clark]

>>>>> "Steve" == Steve Baker <sjbaker1 at airmail.net> writes:

    Jonathan> OK, actually there are 2 thing that I would
    Jonathan> say. Secondly, us all being fans of open source
    Jonathan> software, I'd like to know what kind of projects the
    Jonathan> members are involved in, and possibly have NTLUG
    Jonathan> sponsored projects.
    >>  Sure. We've done that before. NTLUG hosted The Casbah Project
    >> (http://www.casbah.org) for a long time before it got its own
    >> home. Chris uses NTLUG to distribute his Impress tool.

    Steve> But with services like SourceForge, there is little need
    Steve> for that anymore.

Yeah, but this was 30 months ago! Long before Sourceforge, which is a
very new, though well-received development. This was before *any*
Linux IPOs, before the flood of corporate dollars.

    Steve> There is no real reason these days for people to develop
    Steve> software with people who live nearby.  One of the projects
    Steve> I work on has people from Germany, Australia and Brazil
    Steve> working on it...and that's with just 8 people working it.
    Steve> Why would I want to restrict myself to developers from
    Steve> North Texas?

Who said anything about that? The group I develop with is located in
North Carolina, Georgia, Iowa, upstate New York, Belgium, So. Cal and
Boston, etc.

No one said or implied that you or anyone else should restrict who you 
develop with. You misinterpreted Jonathan's remarks.

    Steve> The *only* reason to have a user group that's tied to some
    Steve> chunk of real-world geography is so that people can meet
    Steve> face-to-face.

    Steve> The reason traffic on NTLUG-discuss is low is that there
    Steve> are ALWAYS better places to ask questions that aren't about
    Steve> when and where the next meeting is!  If you have an OpenGL
    Steve> question, you can ask it on either of two newsgroups -
    Steve> several vendor-specific lists - the OpenGL games developers
    Steve> list, etc, etc.  Why the heck would I ask a bunch of random
    Steve> Linux people just because they happen to live within 50
    Steve> miles of me?

You're tilting at windmills. Many newbies of course don't know about
the myriad of groups and mailing lists. For many people the one thing
they know is there are some helpful people on the discuss list. And
one thing we tend to tell them is exactly what you just said; but
until they know that, NTLUG is a fairly safe place for them to ask.

Calm down.

<Kendall/>