[H-GEN] Room Bookings Update

[Russell Stuart]

On Wed, 2009-01-14 at 11:46 +1000, Arjen Lentz wrote:
> Before advertising the shop, make the shop itself appealing.
> If I didn't know anyone at HUMBUG, walking into the room would scare  
> me in a number of ways.

Yes.  That one point is a huge problem.

> > As far as I can remember we have always been Windows
> > hostile.  Seems reasonable to me, as we are essentially an
> > open source club.
> 
> It does not seem reasonable to me at all.
>   a) there are a lots of OSS apps and tools for the Windows platform.  
> Think Firefox and OpenOffice, to keep it very very simple.

I had said something along these lines, but deleted it in
the end.  The line in the sand is that is someone has a
problem with purely proprietary software, no one in Humbug
is going to be too interested - and that is as it should be
as we are an open source organisation.

This does not mean we should dis Windows, just that we are
really not that interested.  As you imply, I have seen 
people talk about a problem with Firefox, Gimp or whatever
on Windows, and the response was not to look at the problem
but to suggest they should not be running Windows.  It is
not a helpful response.

> Having a box of Ubuntu CDs handy (ordered from shipit,ubuntu.com)  
> might be good. Apart from being very kind to simple users (with liveCD  
> and installer combined), if you stick the CD into a Windows box it  
> also contains some of the most common OSS stuff for Windows; so it's  
> all-in-one. Naturally, some among you will insist that Ubuntu sucks  
> and brand Y is clearly better and must be used, however I would  
> suggest to you that if a person is somehow enticed to use Ubuntu,  
> that's a win for Linux. So don't be too picky.

Agreed. All your good reasons aside, Ubuntu gives out free 
CD's and we are not in a position to be picky.  I like the
idea of it having Windows Apps on it as well - I didn't
realise that.  It makes it very attractive.