Our venerable Government has appointed agencies for the specific purpose of promoting Free and Open Source Software in India. Here are some lessons I learnt from my experiences in dealing with one of them.
To promote FOSS: - Once you get an application to rent a server for one of the (if not THE) most visible FOSS projects in India, sit on it for 8 months without any activity. - Agree eventually to the server and the cost, but then raise a whole set of questions about the cost with no understanding of differences in hardware, services, etc. Once you have received a satisfactory rationale, continue to ask the same set of questions every year so that the users of the server can stop wasting time coding and spend it productively dealing with your red tape instead. - Cut down rental periods from 1 year to 6 months (so the rental rate goes higher). Then claim that it would need a committee to approve the 6-month fee, so break each 6 months down into 2 payments of 4 months and 2 months each. Never have the committee sit, so this weird payment scheme continues for the duration of the project. - Delay payments by up to 3 months. Never, ever, make a payment on time. Never, ever make a payment until you receive numerous reminders. - After the delay, once the payment is ready, send the cheque to the wrong person at the wrong address in the wrong city; don't bother to take any pro-active steps to rectify the error when you're informed of it. - Accuse the server administrator (in public channels) of being a thief. Rant at him for not putting up any content on the server (which wasn't his responsibility in the first place). - For the last payment, claim that your mandate is coming to an end so you would only be able to pay for 3 months instead of six. When your mandate does get extended, don't bother to inform the users, so they are left with no clue regarding your new ability to continue supporting them. - If a problem (minor or major) occurs with the server, don't waste time informing the server users and administrators about it. Instead write insightful and constructive blog entries about how the server sucks and why you shouldn't be paying for it. So my tip to GoI and NRC FOSS: thank you for your effort and time, but I suggest you leave FOSS promotion to the experts (us, the community) and get back to playing those futile games which nevertheless bring you so much pleasure. I personally never wish to deal with the NRC FOSS or the GoI again if I need anything FOSS-related. I'd suggest no one else do so either, unless they like spending their time dealing with bureaucracy, sloth, active malice and incompetence. In the meantime, unless some miracle happens, indlinux.net and newsrack.in will both become inactive at the end of this month. Documentary evidence of each of the points noted available at request. -- Raju -- Raj Mathur [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://kandalaya.org/ GPG: 78D4 FC67 367F 40E2 0DD5 0FEF C968 D0EF CC68 D17F PsyTrance & Chill: http://schizoid.in/ || It is the mind that moves _______________________________________________ ilugd mailinglist -- ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd Next Event: http://freed.in - February 22-24, 2008 Archives at: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.user-groups.linux.delhi http://www.mail-archive.com/ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org/
