On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 12:23 AM, VICTOR TARABOLA CORTIANO
<vtc10@c3sl.ufpr.br> wrote:
>
> I would like to add that Librelist is a much need alternative to existing
> mailing list solutions. Let's say that a group of people are trying
> to collaborate over a FOSS project. These people usually need a mailing
> list. What options do they have?
>
> There are two sets of options: (1) commercial solutions and (2) self-hosted
> open-source solution.
>
nongnu.org provides mailing lists. I believe gna.org and sf too.
Thanks for the information. I have not known them before. Whether they are a viable alternative depends on the quality of their service, which I have no idea about. Perhaps people here have experience with them and would care to comment?
> Commercial mailing list providers, such as Google and Yahoo, have a lot of
> resources in their disposal that could in principle be used for providing a
> great mailing list service. But that's not what happens in practice. To
> paraphrase a comment from Librelist's founder Zed Shaw, Google and Yahoo
> optimize their services to give the best experience for the user; Problem
> is, from their perspective, the "user" is not the person trying to
> communicate on the mailing list, but the advertiser paying Google/Yahoo for
> advertising on the mailing list.
In other words, google groups and yahoo are worthless crap.
Not completely worthless crap, they have some nice features, but as a complete solution they are problematic.
> The second approach is to use mailing list software such as mailman or
> piper. This has two problems:
>
> (1) It requires a server for hosting the list, and a system administrator t=
> o
> configure and maintain the mailing list. For some projects this is a big
> barrier, for others it's merely a waste of time and resources.
>
Fair enough for very small projects.
> (2) The popular mailing list programs are not very good. Take mailman for
> example, which is used for this mailing list. It does many things which may
> have been considered acceptable 10 years ago, but not today. The
> subscription process is cumbersome,
$ mail listname-subscribe@host is anything but cumbersome.
> the program sends the user his password in plain text,
Just don't put an important password there. I don't even store my
passwords since I can unsubscribe by mail.
And you don't even need to provide a password.
> and generally its interface looks like a 1995 website.
Mailman does it job well, it's free software and provides easy to
set up archives. What else do you want? Dancing balloney?
I could address your points one-by-one, but if you're the kind of person who considers `mailman` to be a convenient and effective service, then I believe no meaningful communication can occur between us, at least on this matter.
>
> I think that the FSF should sponsor this project. I think it wouldn't
> require a big amount of resources, but it will require the persistence and
> reliability over time that FSF can provide.
>
Why don't you mail the guy from Librelist and the FSF to see
what happens?
This is what I just did. I asked whether this is the proper place to introduce a project to the FSF, and was asked about the project, and then introduced it.