[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

[PROGSOC-ANNOUNCE] The future of ProgSoc



The future of ProgSoc is decidedly unclear. Both the Executive and
Administration Committees have been discussing some of the issues facing
ProgSoc. We believe we have come up with a short list of these, and some
solutions. However we seek input from the members at large. 

The issues, in order of importance, are: liability, membership and
bandwidth. 

Over the course of the last 12 months it seems many members have decided
to become software pirates (warez traders). The Executive have been
contacted by on at least two occassions by software companies who have
discovered their software being made available via ProgSoc. After being
threatened with a lawsuit by one of the companies involved we sought legal
advice.

In essence the advice (apart from outlining a procedure to deal with
threats of this kind) says that whomever the Executive is, _they_ are
liable for the actions of ProgSoc's membership. The executive seek a way
to limit our liability. Some solutions are: having each member sign a
waiver, an insurance policy being taken out, or ProgSoc incorporating.

Which do members feel is the `better' solution? 

The second issue facing ProgSoc is related (tenuously) to the liability
problem above. There doesn't seem to be any `community spirit' in ProgSoc
anymore. People get flamed on mailing lists for doing things slightly
ProgSoc like, very few people seem to be doing programming related
activities (that we know about) and lots of members feel that the AUP
doesn't apply to them (in particular warez traders). 

It is difficult to gauge the success of the ball last year where ProgSoc
was a co-sponsor. But the Executive feel that they only way to `build
community' is to have meetings which are not online. To that end we will
announce meeting details either later today, or early tomorrow. We would
like to know what other steps the members feel we should be taking.

Some other suggestions that we have had include: disabling the web server
for everyone, and only making it available to those who contribute
(actively) to ProgSoc. Disconnecting ProgSoc from the 'Net. Disconnecting
ProgSoc but leaving a machine connected for those who contribute to have
access to. 

The Executive Committee are actively looking into each of these proposals,
and we seek your comments and input upon them. 

The third, and final, issue facing ProgSoc is bandwidth. At some point in
time UTSNet intend to charge users for the bandwidth they consume. 
Whatever price they choose it will be more than ProgSoc can afford to pay.
For example over the last 5 days our chargeable traffic was (on average)
230Mb - the current commercial rate of traffic (per Gig) is $150. That
would be an annual bill of $12,000. 

Some options are: do nothing, encourage less bandwidth use (how?),
encourage more bandwidth use. As I stated initially, the Executive
consider this particular problem the least of their worries. Since they
don't expect bandwidth to occur before their term expires, we have
(tentatively) decided to do nothing.

Once again we seek comment from the membership.

If you have taken the time to read of all of this, thank you. If you have
any comments that you would like the executive to know about please send
them to progsoc@nospam.progsoc.uts.edu.au. If you feel your comments are
confidential please send them to psexec@nospam.progsoc.uts.edu.au

Thanks,
Anand.

-- 
 `When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to
  its subjects, "This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are
  forbidden to know," the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how
  holy the motives' -- Robert A Heinlein, "If this goes on --"