Re: Crazy talk: migrate to Google Apps?

Crazy Talk.

James Polley wrote:
> Disclaimer: I'm talking here in my role as a SLUG member, not in my 
> role as a committee member; I reserve the right to have a different 
> opinion when I put my VP hat on.
>
> Disclaimer: I'm a Google employee, so please add the appropriate 
> amount of salt.
>
> Google launched a version of Groups for Google Apps domains today, 
> which finally allows for mailing list management on your own domain. 
> For a long time, this has been the one thing making Google Apps 
> completely infeasible for hosting SLUG's online presence[1]. Apps now 
> offers mailing lists (on our own domain), web hosting (Sites for very 
> simple things. AppEngine for everything else), calendaring (for an 
> event feed)...
>
> The biggest benefit I see to doing this is the reduced maintenance. 
> SLUG at present runs entirely on volunteer labour; and volunteer 
> labour isn't quite providing us with the amount of effort needed to do 
> basic housekeeping on our server. As one example - we were given a new 
> VM over three months ago to migrate our web/mail hosting to; but 
> because the site hasn't been kept up to date, the effort involved in 
> migrating is large enough that it hasn't been done yet[2]. Migrating 
> to Apps would be less work than migrating to a new VM - and would then 
> require much less maintenance to keep us going.
>
> The biggest downside I see to this is: Google Apps != FOSS. Sure, 
> there's capacity to run FOSS (on AppEngine) - and even to run FOSS 
> that would run just as well if it weren't hosted by Google; and Google 
> provides some support to FOSS; and if we chose to move away, Google 
> make it fairly easy to move away and even take our data... but it's 
> not FOSS.
>
> The second-biggest downside is that I haven't (yet) been able to 
> figure out how arbitrary email addresses can be subscribed to the 
> list: as far as I can tell, only email addresses with an associated 
> Google Account can subscribe (the email address gets a confirmation 
> email with a link; you have to follow the link to confirm on a form 
> that you want to subscribe, and you have to log in to a Google Account 
> in order to get to the form).[3]
>
> To save time and space and electrons, I'm now going to run through 
> some other points very briefly below.
>
> Pro-Google: We're already not using pure-FOSS - the new VM we're 
> migrating to runs inside VMWare.
> Con: But moving to Google is still moving further away from using FOSS 
> - and what kind of FOSS advocacy group are we if we don't use FOSS for 
> our own needs?
> Pro: A manpower-starved FOSS advocacy group
> Con: Really? You can't even manage to look after a couple of dozen 
> static pages and a mailing list or two?
> Pro: History says no, not really.
> Con: But wait - won't this cost money?
> Pro: Yes, but only (assuming we get accounts for 7 committee members 
> at a time) $350/year
> Con: So you're suggesting we migrate from a 
> no-money-but-needs-more-time solution that's known to work, to an 
> almost-no-time-but-needs-more-money solution that has unknown problems?
> Pro: Sure, why not. Surely we can find that small amount of money - or 
> we could even cut it down to just, say, 3 web admins instead of all 7 
> of the committee...
> Con: Hang on - SLUG has always tried to avoid, as much as possible, 
> entanglements, even entanglements with FOSS-friendly companies. 
> Doesn't this entangle us? Plus, what's this nonsense about requiring 
> people to create accounts with Google just to join our mailing list? 
> That's not very nice!
> Pro: Urrr... But Google! Google is shiny! They do no evil, they 
> promised! And besides, they're shiny!
>
> What do you think? Is a migration to Google Apps crazy talk? Is it 
> something we should consider? What matters more to us - using FOSS as 
> far as is possible, even if it severly strains our resources - or 
> being pragmatic, paying a small amount of money to save us a lot of time?
>
> [1] It hasn't been the only reason not to go this way: there are still 
> plenty of reasons why this might not be appropriate, but at least it's 
> *feasible* now.
> [2] We'd have to upgrade from Drupal 4.7 to at least version 5.20. 
> This then introduces other problems, such as the fact that the 
> Flexinode module that was used to create Event pages is no longer 
> supported, so we'd have to come up with an equivalent using CCK, or 
> something similar... It's actually not a lot of work, a single person 
> should be able to knock it over in 2-3 days of work
> [3] The best workaround I've come up with so far - I don't believe you 
> need to authenticate to get the group's RSS feed; and we can set the 
> group to allow mail from any address and rely on manual moderation to 
> keep out the spam

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