dear andrew, [snip]
your proposal for ilug-d is worthy of a thoughtful discussion, and delivers a wham worthy of the name of your former rock band. on the one hand, LUGs find meaning and context only if they belong to a specific organization, which is usually a college, or a commercial software company, or a govt psu or any other type of organization. in such LUGs, everyone has a specific or a more-focussed approach to their purpose for FOSS-adoption, and everyone comes from a similar background separated by a few degrees. on the other, general city-wide or town-wide LUGs are becoming quaint and almost completely redundant, thanks to more meaningful and vertical online and offline communities, and newer kinds of channels (forums, blogs, wikis, search-engines, unconferences, etc). despite all this, some salient facts remain: 01. the adoption of FOSS worldwide is increasing, not decreasing. 02. FOSS is impacting other disciplines. 03. some IT companies, like IBM, Google, HP, Sun, Oracle, and others, have created business-models around FOSS that generate billions of dollars in revenues for them. 04. similarly, several smaller companies and startups have created business-models that generate millions of dollars in revenues. perhaps what you do need to understand, are the different kinds of business-models that have succeeded. keep a sharp eye out for those which have active participation from the community. for example: google adheres to the terms of the GPL, offers various web-services built over FOSS, and ploughs in several million dollars into the community to fund community-based development of FOSS projects, all through their Google summer of code projects. The business models of Sun, IBM, Intel, RedHat, differ. Yet each has some community-participation as well. the osdd project needs to devise a viable community-participation model, that rewards the community for its sweatware somehow. osdd is somewhat unprecedented, and comes with a lot of govt funding. so this demands outofbox thinking. Special discounted life-insurance, and medical-insurance policies from the govt, for OSDD developers? priority access with reduced rates to blood banks for foss developers who contribute? academic-scholarship grants: get a free college education if you contribute to osdd or foss projects? etc. these types of incentives can be set, though they may demand some bureaucratic wrangling with time. immediate, short-term ideas need to be explored: 01. hire developers in a PSU or agency approved for govt-software-development. route projects there. 02. run incubator projects in academia, where startups cut their teeth working for osdd. pay govt-recognized academia for these incubator projects. 03. get microsoft to step-in, convince all the powers-that-be that opensource drug discovery is a bad idea, reincarnate it as sharedsource drug discovery (ssdd) or s2d2. let microsoft pitch and win an exclusive and probably locked-in deal for developing under one of their fsf-approved shared-source licenses, let them hire the same set of developers from the community, pay them a paltry sum, and let microsoft walk away with a crown jewel of a project, funded by india, developed by hired indians, and pwned by microsoft. okay. now that i've mentioned microsoft, hopefully that would rally everyone to suddenly get motivated and passionate about osdd to find a solution for development. else, who knows, osdd > ssdd may just create pills too bitter to swallow. oh! the irony of anti-viral opensource microsoft medicines, under the ssdd project. regards niyam _______________________________________________ ilugd mailinglist -- [email protected] http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd Archives at: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.user-groups.linux.delhi http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
