Dear Mumbai Linuxers

May I suggest a topic for the meeting? This is to meet an urgent and very real need of a service group that I happen to think is particularly important to India, and Mumbai as well.

The service group is cybercafe operators. Currently, as many of you know, cybercafes are very tiny outfits, aside from the hyped up Sifys and Webworlds, which are just a handful.

Most of these outfits use Windows in various flavors - I hesitate to call it MS Windows, for the simple reason that most copies are in fact pirated and of poor quality (now, now, let's not get ;-) nasty everyone, about the quality of the native product).

As a result, when the police get into one of their sudden spurts of public spirit and barge into these little corner shops, enthusiastically rounding up customers and owners indiscriminately, while purportedly looking for offcolour downloads and spies around every corner, they have a very easy and genuine excuse for harassment - illegal software. The current level of hafta is around one month's gross revenue for a small cafe, renewable whenever the local officer concerned gets transferred and a new one comes around hungry.

So what's the solution, and how can we help?

Most of these businesses are really small, and are quite technically unequipped to deal with issues of software and hardware. They depend on small assemblers for their low cost machines, and this usually means the machines come preloaded with some form of Windows OS, and the usual slew of applications that customers want.

I don't know what cybercafe customers actually want by way of applications, and I suspect that not many of us do either. What I am suggesting is that we turn the LUG meet into a session where representatives of both cybercafes and small assemblers can come, with the objective being to make a wish-list. We need to find out what the statistically typical hardware configuration is, what the commonly used applications are, and to make a distro that will install on most cybercafe machines.

This distro can be duplicated either by members for a small fee, or turned over to the cybercafe reps at some point, or distributed through Mumbai IT magazines, or whatever. These points need to be worked out in consultation with the target audience ie., the owners and the assemblers. Idea is of course ease of use for both cybercafe owners and for the assemblers, who as you know are hardly aware that there are any choices in OS other than Windows.

I think that although the owners are really very small businesses, and as a group quite unorganised, we may possibly be able to create a set of local micro-businesses for members doing this (keeping the distros updated and uniform over time). I am thinking not just of the task of making readymade distros, but of low cost training (neighborhood informal training schools) for assemblers and their techies.

If this idea sounds interesting to you all, please do offer your yeas or nays here on the list. Dr Jitu Shah is already sensitised to this matter, and has I understand offered the use of the C-DAC offices in Nariman Point (capacity 60 persons seating) for a meeting on the subject. 9 Jan sounds like a good date for such a meeting, kicking off the new year on a very positive and socially useful manner.

I do hope that some or all of you agree.

On Tue, 2004-12-28 at 11:49, Amish Munshi wrote:

...

Hello all,

Where can we have the meeting on 9th? What is the agenda?

Amish.

We can do this at MET this time--around 60 of their students are likely to attend. Satish Mohan of Red Hat is willing to talk on Open Source Architecture. This talk was also given at the Calcutta LUG and around 100 people attended.

Venky