City governments (especially in Germany and France) have recently begun seriously consider migrating to Linux, and feasibility studies are being done and to some extent are publically available. The study done for Munich, for instance, recognizes that cities need sometimes hundreds of specialized software packages that are not yet available for Linux, and so the cities will have to continue running the Windows versions of those apps for the time being. Yet it suggests using Terminal Services and/or VmWare to run those apps! Clearly, the Wine community needs to make an effort to address the needs of city governments and to get the word out that Wine is a viable option.
One important part of this effort should be a mailing list akin to wine-users but dedicated to governmental users of Wine. (wine-users is full of all sorts of topics that might not mix well with staid government workers; some of the games discussed there might even be banned in Germany!) Dedicating a mailing list to this special category of user would greatly increase the signal-to-noise ratio, and should increase the likelihood that government users would feel comfortable about Wine.
IMHO the list should allow posts in any language; if nobody can handle the language a post is in, we'll ask the poster to try again in English. The goal here is to avoid intimidating these possibly skittish users; asking them to *always* post in English might scare some of them away.
Comments?
Thanks, Dan
Dan Kegel wrote:
IMHO the list should allow posts in any language; if nobody can handle the language a post is in, we'll ask the poster to try again in English. The goal here is to avoid intimidating these possibly skittish users; asking them to *always* post in English might scare some of them away.
Could the mailing list robot add a little URL at the bottom of the page that directs the mail to a google translator. I'm not sure how it is done. I know from experience that in technical matters google translators does an OK Job, Good enough to understand.
Boaz Harrosh wrote:
Dan Kegel wrote:
IMHO the list should allow posts in any language; if nobody can handle the language a post is in, we'll ask the poster to try again in English. The goal here is to avoid intimidating these possibly skittish users; asking them to *always* post in English might scare some of them away.
Could the mailing list robot add a little URL at the bottom of the page that directs the mail to a google translator. I'm not sure how it is done. I know from experience that in technical matters google translators does an OK Job, Good enough to understand.
The archive could. I don't know of any mailing list software that can add a URL to the archived version of the message, but it ought to be possible. Probably we don't want to wait for this, though, to set up the mailing list.
Enrico Weigelt (weigelt_at_metux.de) wrote:
Dedicating a mailing list to this special category of user would greatly increase the signal-to-noise ratio, and should increase the likelihood that government users would feel comfortable about Wine.
ACK.
BTW: if for some reason (I cant image any good one) the winehq folks dont want such an list @winehq, i'd offer to host it at my site.
I could probably host it at kegel.com, actually, but my preference would be to host it at winehq.
IMHO the list should allow posts in any language; if nobody can handle the language a post is in, we'll ask the poster to try again in English. The goal here is to avoid intimidating these possibly skittish users; asking them to *always* post in English might scare some of them away.
hmm, shouldn't we better split off into several languages, at least german and english ?
I thought of that, but I'd like to try having just one list for starters, then split off -fr and -de lists as the number of french and german posts grows large enough. I really hate it when organizations create too-finely-divided mailing lists that never achieve critical mass, and I suspect there are enough bilingual people among the target audience (European system administrators) to make mixing languages on the mailing list work out.
We don't really have a procedure for starting new mailing lists. Should we have a vote (a la the old Usenet group creation rules)? - Dan
On Mon, Feb 23, 2004 at 09:16:46PM -0800, Dan Kegel wrote:
We don't really have a procedure for starting new mailing lists. Should we have a vote (a la the old Usenet group creation rules)?
IMHO, it should just be created. It will not remove any traffic from the existing lists, so why should anyone care? It it turns out to be not used, it may still be closed down again. But that's for the experiment to decide :)
Ciao Jörg
Joerg Mayer wrote:
IMHO, it should just be created.
Well, shoot, let's do it. Look, Rome just announced they're going to migrate some of their systems (servers and perhaps email clients?) to Linux:
http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/urltrurl?lp=it_en&url=http://ww...
There's a lot going on with Linux on the desktop in European municipal governments, and IMHO it'll be reassuring for them to have a forum just for their issues with Wine. - Dan
* Dan Kegel dank@kegel.com [2004-02-22 00:16:21 -0800]:
Hi,
City governments (especially in Germany and France) have recently begun seriously consider migrating to Linux, and feasibility studies are being done and to some extent are publically available. The study done for Munich, for instance, recognizes that cities need sometimes hundreds of specialized software packages that are not yet available for Linux, and so the cities will have to continue running the Windows versions of those apps for the time being.
hmm, I'm pro this. Since I'm working as developer and system integrator, such topics are really interesting for me. But they of course dont really belong to the wine-users list.
Perhaps we could also set up a general wine-advocacy list, where we discuss general things, i.e. vmware vs. wine, etc.
Yet it suggests using Terminal Services and/or VmWare to run those apps! Clearly, the Wine community needs to make an effort to address the needs of city governments and to get the word out that Wine is a viable option.
ACK.
BTW: this way we perhaps could make clearer to the goverments, that they dont just use another operating system (-kernel), but instead go completely opensource - meaning all govermental processes have to be transparent (of course this takesj political processes, but perhaps we could help here a little bit)
One important part of this effort should be a mailing list akin to wine-users but dedicated to governmental users of Wine. (wine-users is full of all sorts of topics that might not mix well with staid government workers; some of the games discussed there might even be banned in Germany!)
Yeah, wine-users too wide for this. Most talk there's about quite specific questions. For govermental users, we have more general questions, i.e. is some package running, what problems may occour when running package XYZ under wine, etc.
Dedicating a mailing list to this special category of user would greatly increase the signal-to-noise ratio, and should increase the likelihood that government users would feel comfortable about Wine.
ACK.
BTW: if for some reason (I cant image any good one) the winehq folks dont want such an list @winehq, i'd offer to host it at my site.
<snip>
IMHO the list should allow posts in any language; if nobody can handle the language a post is in, we'll ask the poster to try again in English. The goal here is to avoid intimidating these possibly skittish users; asking them to *always* post in English might scare some of them away.
hmm, shouldn't we better split off into several languages, at least german and english ?
-- US citizens: if you're considering voting for Bush, look at these first: http://www.misleader.org/ http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/arar/ http://www.house.gov/reform/min/politicsandscience/
European Citizens: please hava a look at how the European Commission aims to make the European IT business to slaves of international juristokrats -- http://patinfo.ffii.org/
cu
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Boaz Harrosh -
Dan Kegel -
Enrico Weigelt -
Joerg Mayer