Open Letter to Turkish LUG

The Turkish Linux User Group decided to raise a yearly fee for memberships and email aliases due to the inability to get sponsors for their other projects. Read on for an open letter by Andreas Mueller. On July 19th a small group from linux.org.tr (Linux-Tuerkiye) decided to raise an yearly fee for an e-mail alias/membership at linux.org.tr. They also decided to split the user group into 2 parts. I'm a member of Linux-Tuerkiye. Below please find two postings from TRLUUG officers, both of them are personal friends of mine. There were no discussion between users and officers regarding the upcoming fee before, the fee was simply dictated. The reason was to make money.

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.

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