Re: Org ML integration with an existing Discourse instance (was: IM dev discussions?)

[Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com>]

Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@gmail.com> writes:

> Payas Relekar <relekarpayas@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Perhaps we can check if it is indeed possible to bridge both Discourse
>> and mailing list seamlessly (or close enough). There are some issues
>> with extra chrome and clutter in discourse notifications, but these 2
>> links are what I found in 5 minutes of googling. A more thorough
>> research might just yield what we desire.
>
> The main question we need to answer is who is going to maintain that
> Discourse instance. AFAIU, Bastien is mainly concerned with the extra
> maintenance burden.
>
> Can we simply reuse some of the existing discourse instances like Org
> Roam? Will the existing maintainers be interested to take this task?
>
> If we have a volunteer to run Discourse and setup the email bridge, I
> feel we can get something really useful.

It is largely about maintenance, but what about hosting? Discourse is
not free - either you have to pay or you have to self host. Where would
we self host?

Given that Discourse is open source and free (in GNU sense being GPL
v2), perhaps a better approach would be to try and get the FSF to host a
Discourse server from GNU projects (not just org). This would be in
addition to the mail lists hosting currently provided.

I think Discourse is an interesting take on things and I can see how it
could be beneficial to org mode, but we need to be realistic about the
costs and resources needed. We have to have a reasonable confidence
regrading long-term viability (i.e. our ability to administer and
resource the service). I think it would be a mistake to rely on a 3rd
party provider unless we have high confidence that 3rd party will be
able to resource and maintain a server over the long term.