This post has been a long time coming, mostly delayed due to personal and professional activities which have kept me busy.
Anyway, this my take on the last Blug meet which was a special meet with Mark Shuttleworth. The meeting was a blast, Mark Shuttleworth’s speech was fascinating and very educational. Yahoo were awesome hosts, big thank you to Philip and co. We should do more meets there, that was a blast. But the question that haunted me throughtout the meet was
Was it really a BLUG meet?
Let me explain what a blug meet really means to me: The Bangalore Linux Users meet to discuss Free and Open Source in “general” and also acts as a medium where various user groups have a healthy discussion. Now this BLUG meet was totally Ubuntu and with a personality like Mark there, I think most of us would think twice before asking a tricky question, I mean i get a “OpenOffice sucks” every blug meet, do you think any of us would dare say “Ubuntu sucks” there? The meet turned out to be good marketing for Ubuntu.
I think we need to re-phrase such meets. The Blug meets should be about the BLUG not about Ubuntu or Suse or Red Hat. Such meets can be termed as spaces for interested user groups to meetup. I have no issues in people from the Blug organizing such events. Infact when Nat or Miguel get here next time, I would love for them to meet people from the BLUG but please lets not make it a BLUG meet. Thats not really what it means.
Advocacy is a standard practice in our world but lets not mix it with the BLUG.
3 comments ↓
Hey, but you haven’t been to space … 😉
And I hear what you’re saying, but nothing to be done about it.
And I hear what you’re saying, but nothing to be done about it.
i dont get it! Are you saying nothing should be done about it or nothing will eventually be done ?
Hey, OOo does suck. It just sucks less than MS Office.
Also, LUG meets are about FOSS. A Ubuntu themed meet is as valid as a BLUG themed meet.