On 01/26/2011 05:44 PM, Luke S Crawford wrote: > Evan Pettrey<jepett...@gmail.com> writes: > >> I've noticed that the vast majority of sys admins who are heavily involved >> in the online community and the real-life community (i.e. professional orgs >> like LOPSA) seem to be Linux admins. Why is it that Linux admins tend me to >> be so much more involved do you guys think? > > Eh, I think it's pretty clearly a cultural thing. There has been a long > history with *NIX of sysadmins and users modifying the system and > sharing those modifications. The Windows community, it would seem, > lacks that tradition.
I think a large part of it is how the communities are organized. I currently manage about 80 servers. That's split about 65 windows/15 *nix (mixture of Debian, RHEL, OS X, HP-UX, and ESXi). As a result I've been to a a few of *nix focused conferences (LISA and SCALE) and a few Windows focused conferences (MS TechEd and Windows Connections). There is a very different feel between the two sets of conferences. The former are organized by 3rd party organizations that cut across vendors. The later are either organized by the vendor directly or by a 3rd party which focuses the conference on a single vendor. The former tends to actively help develop the community (key signing events, promoting the "hallway track" etc.). I wouldn't say the later discourages it, but they certainly don't promote it in the same ways. I'm sure the open source nature of significant parts of the *nix ecosystem also plays a large part in it. > Maybe it's the academic origins of *NIX? My understanding is that in > academic settings, your status is determined by how much you publish. > This may have trickled down into the *NIX community, where sharing patches, > documentation and help is a strong way to gain social status. I think this is particularly true with conferences. I regularly see call-for-papers for *nix related conferences. I don't think I've ever seen anything similar for a Windows conference. -- Thanks Jefferson Cowart j...@cowart.net _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.lopsa.org https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
