[Kernel-meetup] Reserved-bit closing this month

[Siddhesh Poyarekar]

On 02/12/19 1:05 pm, shirish शिरीष wrote:
> Was sad when I saw this but am appreciative of the fact that you took
> the effort to discuss or share issues threadbare. I am not at all
> surprised at the GST bit as have had the same story being echoed by
> multiple people at multiple levels. I have discussed and seen that the
> shoddy implementation of GST and especially the refund process has
> made even some of the most honest people turn to either do black money
> generation or close down their operations as you had to resort to.

Yes, the GST roulette hit us quite hard, especially the uncertainty
around it.  It wasn't the central reason for us shutting down
operations, but it was definitely a key factor.  The fact that we
weren't able to monetize our goodwill was perhaps a more important reason.

> You didn't share the bit about how reserved-bit got burned but guess
> that incident was out of your control and the responsibility lies with
> the building management but I guess that also impacted negatively to
> your operations as you mention the impact of moving to smaller space
> did to the venture.

Yes that was just bad luck, not something for any future aspirants to
learn for, except maybe that life is hard? :)

> Sad to see this go but do hope that the domain, website can be used to
> share about any new potential makerspaces in Pune and surroundings and
> be a central location for resources for potential new makers.
> 
> You already have mediawiki hosted at the reserved-bit space, maybe you
> could give this a bit more space and make it a centralised affair. I
> do hope the mailing list still continues.
> 
> I do not know if having the domain space, web hosting and mailing list
> is significantly going to hit your bottom-line or not. If yes, please
> close these down or alternatively perhaps have some sort of funding
> drive (on the lines of kickstarter or something similar) which will at
> least keep the communication lines open for as long as possible.

The domain and hosting will stay alive; it is part of our family of
domains (siddhesh.in, gotplt.org, reserved-bit.com, etc.) and
reserved-bit.com itself is hardly a drain on resources.  Likewise, this
mailing list will be unaffected.  I am planning to make the mediawiki
instance static since it has been unused for quite some time.  That will
basically be a record of previous meetups and projects at reserved-bit.

I am not very hopeful of someone coming up and resuming reserved-bit
(wouldn't they want their own brand name?) but if at all someone is
interested in taking over, I'm more than happy to share domain, hosting,
etc. as long as they keep this mailing list alive.

Siddhesh