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Open Letter to Turkish LUG
Here are my thoughts:
a) To hire a partime student. I know that there are many students who create webpages for free projects at no charge. (Look at http://www.debian.org/ for example)
There were three people offering help with the pages, keeping them up to date. Their offer was rejected. Help wasn't wanted.
b) In a free software community (like the Linux community) all email addresses have some "value". It doesn't make sense to create subdomains within such a linux. domain. We don't need a new two-level hierarchy.
c) Maybe comming soon, members.linux.org.tr will also be splitted into active and passive, stupid and clever.
d) Mr. Gorkem does his job at no charge. If he can't do this anymore, we have to look for somebody else. There are many people who would like to help. It is unacceptable to raise a fee for being an officer of such an organization.
e) Large membership. Mr. Gorkem said that running linux.org.tr depends on personal activity of the officers. It's said that there are 90 members. I'm unable to believe that none of these 90 people would like spend some time on it without charging anybody for it. Why would they want an email alias? Just for fun?
f) Support for Linux. There are three commercial companies at Tuerkiye, that provide professional support for Linux. One of them receives support from me in form of FREE bandwith, with a computer hosted in our network. The other one is the company I work for, we also give FREE support for Linux, including freebies for people who can't afford purchasing a CD.
A while time ago I started a new project to translate Debian into Turkish. This includes webpages as well, so I searched for peoples who can help. I found 40 (fourty) people who wanted to work on this this project FOR FREE. They spend their time thats all. I also invited the German Linux Community to Tuerkiye last year. 20 people have had very much fun time. The Sponsors were the airplane company Akdeniz, a local HighSchool, the German Unix User Group and myself. I even have paid for hotel and meal for the Turkish people out of my own pocket.
My personal activity for Linux at Tuerkiye is very, very HIGH. Richard Stallman visited Tuerkiye one month ago. Now linux.org.tr seems to act like a commercial company. Is this what we deserve?
I don't believe so. If your new plan to make Linux much more attractive, please walk around and ask people who would work for FREE. I'm sure you can find people. You can also find sponsors. For example, when Richard Stallman visited Turkiye, I asked my boss if we could provide him a car. He agreed.
It's also serious that there's no protocol about your meeting or other people don't know about this secret event. At least the situation very dim about what happend with linux.org.tr and I cannot accept this situation. Dont forget Linux is an operating system developed by many, many people and these people invested _their_ free time to develop it. I'll also say thanks that I'm able to choose to use this great product for FREE.
Maybe linux.org.tr needs new Ideas, but if you get money from individuals this is the wrong way. Other people replied to me with a "big thank" for my posting, but they hesitated to post themselves such a letter. Please think again about your ideas for linux.org.tr.
For more information, please see this web page.
First off, I help to run a small LUG, NBLUG in my area. We don't have a strict membership roster, but there are about 25 people that show up for just about every event and twice that many show up when we have something more interesting going on. I'm, basically, second in charge.
Back when we first started, there were several people that said "Let's start a LUG". Of those, two, myself and Dustin (the main guy in charge) actually put enough energy into it to make it happen. We found a place to meet, decided on some basic "ground rules" and announced a bunch of places that we were having a meeting. The first meeting's topic was what to do with the LUG. And, of course, to solicit volunteers. Quite frankly, getting people to volunteer to help out simply hasn't been a problem. If anything, we've gotten more offers to help than we need helpers.
Money: LUGs really shouldn't need very much money. In order to get resources I'd suggest trying a few different things:
People to run it: There could be all sorts of cultural differences between the left coast of the USA and Turkey, but out here finding people willing to help run a LUG was really not a problem at all. If somebody is finding that they can't donate the time to run it, then somebody who is willing to donate time (or multiple somebodies) should be found. It couldn't be that hard.
We have found it a little harder to get people good at making pretty graphics, but we found a few, even if we are bribing them with a few of the books and t-shirts that O'Reilly gave us.
It's important that somebody be able to simple show up at a LUG meeting whenever it's supposed to happen and get some kind of useful information pertaining to Linux and a chance to talk to other people that are using Linux. Remember, a LUG should really be more of a grassroots campaign to get Linux (or FreeBSD or some other free Unix) onto the computers of people and to help out people that already have Linux on their computers. These kinds of things help to further the Linux meme in good ways. Trying to make a LUG into an exclusive club so that you can all be "cool" is a bad idea. (Though, of course, allowing it to be a good place for people that already run Linux and know it well to "Network" and socialize is a Good Thing®
I guess it is important to let you know that this posting predates the earthquake in Turkey since it was written on July 24th but locked in the Slashdot Queue for a while. And well, at the moment there are more important things than this in Turkey, but these things get developed as well so they need to be worked on as well. Joey