[Foundation-l] Possible project

[Samuel Klein]

Ram, thanks for sharing your interesting project.

On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 7:15 PM, Platonides <Platonides at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Librelist is a free as in freedom mailing list site for open source
>> projects. It is a place for FOSS communities to discuss all the things they
>> want without ads, censorship, signup requirements, bundled apps, or
>> requirements that you use any particular email client or service.

Limited to FOSS communities?

>> People don't want
>> to start a mailing list on a service that might get closed 6 months from
>> now. The founder of Librelist seems enthusiastic enough, but this is a
>> non-profit project for him, so it's impossible to be certain that he will
>> not become too busy for the project in the future.
>
> That can be solved to some extent by making it easy to fork. I see that
> the mailing lists are rsyncable which is very nice.

+1

> I don't think that fits cleanly into the Mission, but the decision is up
> to the board.

Platonides is right, it's not clearly part of our current mission -
though it does facilitate some types of collaboration, mail threads
are parallel to our notion of talk pages.  There's certainly something
to be gained from thinking about what our mailing lists provide that
LiquidThreads* does not, and identifying/supporting efforts to improve
that channel for conversations.
(*This is our current concept of threaded discussion in the context of
directly collaborating on some sort of lasting  knowledge)

But just as we don't support multiple wiki platforms or mailman
itself, we aren't generally a project host. Have you talked to the FSF
about hosting such a service, considering your FOSS focus?

SJ