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

[sankarshan]

On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 10:41 AM, Ankur Sinha<sanjay.ankur at gmail.com> wrote:

> This is because everyone that requests a media does not turn into a
> local contact. The media is not following the "receiver becomes donor"
> scheme that we want it to.

We never did visualize the "receiver becomes donor" way of paying it
forward. The idea was to de-lineate the LocalContacts from the "free"
FreeMedia aspect. Which in plain terms means that the LCs should be
able to project that they are charging for the media.

> Local contacts are usually students who have a fixed pocket money. You
> can do the math :)

So, do I take it that the students will not want to set up a system
whereby they can charge for media and, keep a margin for themselves ?
That's a paradox really. I would have thought that given the volume of
demand and scarcity of supply, it should have been a reasonably nice
opportunity.

> As Rangeen mentions in his reply, UGs are merely students. Again , same
> equation. Another variable that messes this up is that Fedora isn't the
> only distribution around. Since they are Linux UGs and not Fedora UGs,
> getting people to distribute fedora dvds is difficult. They all support
> their different distributions and fundamentally want the same thing we
> do, for them. There's a hefty discussion as to which distro we are going
> to use in the install fest. Its not always Fedora.

Let me rephrase the question (assuming that neither Rangeen nor you
did get the drift) - can UGs actually be ready to set up a system
whereby they charge for media when requested and, keep the margin in
the UG account ? For example, http://plug.org.in/software.php - is
this model difficult to replicate across other UGs and, especially
institute UGs ?

> A query: Are all the local contacts members of the free media list,
> rather, do they all check to see if there are requests that they can
> service or is this done by somebody (who assigns such media requests to
> local contacts)??

I don't have the answer to that off-hand, but I can check around.


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