[Fedora-India] Queries regarding the Free media project in India

[Rangeen Basu]

On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 9:09 AM, susmit
shannigrahi<thinklinux.ssh at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> But we have a *lot* of LocalContacts, but does that fulfill any of the
> freemedia requests?
> I have not seen any.

Very true. Local contacts can serve requests which originate from
within a rang of a few kilometres. Anything beyond that boils down to
the same postage issue. Even the next city is out of reach for local
contacts. People are not willing to travel and collect the media
themselves. It is much easier for them to obtain a pirated Windows CD.

One alternative is to use VPP [1] . If we can keep some option as
Susmit suggested, "I want to pay" or "I don't want to pay" and if free
media is not "free as in free beer", then we can send the media
through VPP and collect the money from India Post once the media is
delivered. I am not sure though what will happen if the delivery is
refused. According to India Post site, it will be returned to the
sender and the sender needs to pay any "outstanding dues", not sure
what outstanding dues mean but that can be found out easily. Once a
freemedia request is accepted, the acceptor can mail the requester and
take his confirmation before mailing the disc through VPP. In this way
the chances of denial during delivery will be reduced a lot. The
requester will have to pay approximately Rs 50 (cost of DVD +
postage).

[1] http://www.indiapost.gov.in/Netscape/ValuePayableArticles.html

-- 
Regards
Rangeen Basu Roy Chowdhury
Fedora Ambassador
sherry151 at gmail.com