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On Friday 13 Jun 2003 9:38 am, Saswata Banerjee & Associates wrote:
It is not just burning CDs. It is
a. Buying CDs b. Keeping Inventory of CDs (both fresh and burned) c. Burning CDs d. Maintaing an ordering system e. Maintaining a delivery system f. Collecting Money and depositing it in the bank g. Providing for expenses, budgets, etc f. Recording and Handling of complaints h. Sales Tax and Income Tax related Matters i. Listening to and repying to all flames and critisism of well-intentioned clules people who wont do the work themselvel (like me ?)
What I feel is, one should not look at it as a major commercial initiative, its an affort done in good faith to popularize linux in India, not a way to make money. If that is so, we dont need all that formal mechanism. How about, someone [via a php script on lig-bombays webpage] posts a request for a CD. Someone from the list voulanteers to meet the request, gives his address, the concerned person sends a draft/cheque, and the volunteer cuts and couriers the CD. Its only 100 Rs or so max per request, so if someone voulanteers and runs away after getting money, he would only do it once with some loss of face.
This will involve a repository of CDs or ISOs. Making available a variety of distribution to local users would be a great service. One can ask other LUGs for donation of CDs to initially build a nice archieve, and the list published on ilug-bombay homepage, along with the proposed mechanism, so that a person is aware of the risks before sending money, as well as list or number of requests successfully served by respective voulanteers to build the confidance. Its not essential, group can warn poeple if someone is eating money.
If Kapil gets bored doing this, he can hand over his collection to other voulanteer, or even better we have more than one voulanteers from the begining.
There are some 5-6 standard linux distributions, and tens of experimental/special purpose ones, Mumbai, as the biggest city of India, deserves easy access to them.
- -- Amit Upadhyay Senior Undergraduate Student Department of Mechanical Engg. Indian Institute of Technology Bombay Mumbai-76, India Phone: (91) 9820325940