This seems like a misleading title. The SVLUG isn't closing, it's just their last meeting at Symantec. It seems they don't have another meeting place set up formally yet, but I see no indication that the group is actually closing at all.
It's not a guaranteed closure, but if I remember correctly an issue like is what put an end to my local LUG. Finding a new venue is a fair amount of work, and if activity is low and there's no-one interested in co-ordinating the whole thing it's easy for the group to just fade away quietly.
I wish there was a way for Feedly to update its headlines when articles get updated... is this a problem with RSS in general or are they just lazy about it?
I dunno, it isolated itself from the tech community years ago by not being terribly effective at stopping viruses and malware, and it's still making a lot of money.
Regulatory capture is a much better marketing strategy than appealing to the tech community. PCI/HIPAA/etc makes antivirus mandatory, so no need to convince users.
Do you know of any other group that meets at Symantec with as much of a high profile as SVLUG?
They would have at least considered the effect on SVLUG before making the decision. That much is clear.
Then it stands to reason that this is an action Symantec is taking at least willing to kick out SVLUG, if not explicitly or implicitly stating that as the primary reason.
SVLUG's had three generous tentative offers of meeting space, thanks in part to the good folks here. The somewhat bigger problem is SVLUG's staffing, notably its absence. As a member of the Web Team, I've been holding the group together for years after active volunteers found other interests elsewhere and walked away, e.g., Yudhvir Singh Sidhu resigned as Meeting Coordinator after doing a terrific job for years, and nobody took his place. This past January, I gave the group a heads-up that the March 2nd speaker had cancelled but I was going to be on the Pacific Ocean for a month so someone else would have to fill the vacancy. I returned in late February and found nobody had even tried, and March's meeting had to be cancelled.
SVLUG hasn't had elected officers since 2009, when the last President and VP's terms expired. Nominations were open at the December 2nd, 2009 meeting, but nobody wished to be a candidate.
I'm certainly not faulting people for having other interests. These things happen. (I myself always stressed that I was unwilling to run SVLUG because I already run another LUG, CABAL.) I suspect that if speakers show an interest in giving talks, one of the kind offers will be accepted, but the basic institutional problem within the group is a real one.
Reads like a facility issue, not the ending of the group. Having run user groups, this is a common challenge, but hardly a death knell. However, maybe there's a backstory I don't know.
So can anyone here from SVLUG confirm whether they have a new venue lined up? If not I can make some enquiries about possibilities in our facilities in South San Jose.
It is interesting that an extremely technical community has been booted from their regular meeting spot by the supposedly tech focussed company Symantec.
SVLUG is quite an influential LUG. The loss is all Symantec's, though they don't appear to realise that.
So now that the confusion about SVLUG closing has been removed and nothing serious is going on, this reminds me of exciting times loooong ago, when Marc Andreessen spoke at SVLUG and then Netscape had buses waiting outside to drive everyone (who didn't want to drive themselves) to San Francisco's "Sound Factory" for the Netscape (open source) release party [0]. I also remember Linus Torvalds as speaker. At one of the meetings I won a SCSI card - which I gifted to the "student network" of my (German) university, a network created by and administered by students in 1994, connecting several thousand students in dormitories to the 155 Mbit ATM backbone of the university. I don't remember a time without high-speed Internet all the way to my room, it's always been there...
Since I moved out of the Bay Area in 2004 I don't have any more recent memories :)
I was at the Free the Lizard party - what a blast. I remember Google speaking there - I won a pair of boxer briefs, with a strategically placed "I'm feeling lucky" printed on them - I still wear them.
