[Nottingham] Linux Tuition

[Jon Masters]

On Thu, 10 Jul 2003, James Gibbon wrote:

> I give free technical advice and help to people very often on fora
> and mailing lists like this one, I also receive it occasionally,
> and if I were to support an initiative to provide a little training
> and familiarity, it would be essentially an extension of this and
> carried out in exactly the same spirit.  I'd be saddened to
> discover that a majority of others involved didn't feel the same
> way.

I too give large amounts of technical advice on numerous LUG lists across
the country and on several larger scale lists both commercial and
non-commercial. Unfortunately proper professionally done evening classes
are going to cost money to run and that is true in any situation.

There is no need to debate this forever however - simply that my belief
is that we will need to charge to hold such a series and others feel it
might be better if we hire the venue ourselves and take on all the
liability because that is somehow the Free and Open thing to do. I point
out that the last time we had hired the Dunkirk Community center for an
event without any additional resources, we had food and accomodation
thanks to commercial sponsorship - do we rely on such generous gestures
each and every time or do we accept that some events require support?

I argue that regular LUG meetings and mailing list activities are what
make the LUG such an interesting place but in order to host some events
then it is both necessary and wholly reasonable to do them right and with
the correct resources required. If I genuinely thought I could make large
amounts of money running Linux evening classes and not quite the
opposite then I think I would have tackled that one by now... :-).

I really have very little more to add to this since Simon has forced me to
repeatedly express my sentiments in variously varied ways following his
extremely rude decision to take something spoken in one environment and
repeat in verbatim in another - rather than even bother finishing a
conversation with me on IRC he obviously deemed it more generally amusing
to himself to create some kind of aukward situation on the list.

Jon.