At 12:06 PM +0530 1/5/05, sherlock@vsnl.com wrote:
Although the subject line has now been added to with three magic words (incl one acronym), I beg to differ: the original topic was the suggested use of the LUG physical meets to interface with others who have what I defined was a very real need. Yes, windows is not easy, but when you are pirating, then if one pirate copy does not work for whatever reason, then you get another that does. We all have a fairly clear idea of how this pirate stuff began, but that is water under the bridge now. Is the legal alternative a practical alternative, will it maintain or lower the total cost of doing business?
And here you have an opportunity, with the small businessperson coming forward to you, asking for help to get out of this uncomfortable situation.
But who is charging? Does anyone here think that the local service levels for any flavours of GNU/Linux OSes is satisfactory? (I don't include so-called Enterprise systems, because that is not aimed at this target group in the first place). I am suggesting this as one step for creating another layer of small businesspeople, those who can add value to the small businesspeople set of entrepreneurs (without, as someone caustically suggested a couple of days back, becoming super-techies themselves). Surely some people on this list are confident enough of their skills? Does everyone need to rise up to their level, even when that is not their main thing in life?
What do you call personal gain? There must be some very rich cybercafe owners out there, but we aren't talking about them. We are talking about small businesspeople. They don't make a lot of money, they don't have a lot of money. But they will pay some real money to minimise the real costs they have to bear for being in business.
I think some of you may have read Ashish Saboo's mail a few days back. I don't think that his attempt to pull together a coalition of small businesspeople needed such a supercilious set of responses. Either everyone on this list has got some good well-paying secure jobs, or you have all forgotten what it takes to run a business in India from scratch.
Although the history of cybercafes is quite recent (I believe they just celebrated the decade anniversary of the first one, in London), there are quite a few people who think that this innovation is at least as powerful and potentially far more powerful than the PCO. I am one of them, as you may have guessed.
I see absolutely no reason that a business based on fairly inexpensive consumer devices should require a PhD in computer science at the entry level - and given a working life of three to four years for the average small businessperson - certainly there is no reason for the vast majority of them to acquire such indepth tech knowledge - unless the fundas of the business are genuinely too complex. Goodbye ICT, in that case, but maybe none of you here are interested in what that is.
It irks me no end to read about the ham-handed way our government (both state and central) goes about frequently changing the rules of the game for cybercafe owners (for all users of ICT actually, but the main bloc of commercial users are cybercafes). Against such inevitable and wayward externalities, one simple solution is for persons with a little more tech knowledge to band together to offer - for a fee, no-one is suggesting anything else.
What will the fees be, who will charge them, what is the service offering - are you waiting for NASSCOM or IMC or the Mumbai Police to define this for you, or are you willing to come together and work with a group of these small businesspeople - for all you know, some are your neighbours - and work this out for yourself? If not at a LUG, maybe this isn't the best time and place, then the alternative already suggested is CDAC at Nariman Point, on a suitable day.
And if this list isn't a suitable place to discuss the real world, then perhaps anyone who does volunteer a little time and effort to kick this off can put together a different list where the right solution can emerge.
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Vickram Crishna