[plug] Announcement

[Cameron Patrick]

Chris Griffin wrote:

> If, as someone said, most of you are Debian based and hence not
> really interested in answering queries on other distros, then call
> yourself DUG and stop trying to pretend you are having membership
> drives advertising help for "LINUX", when all you are really
> interested in is "numbers and DUG".

WTF?  That statement combines a few factual errors with some bad
reasoning, and the conclusion seems to have no grounding in reality.
PLUG is not about numbers, and we've never had membership drives (the
closest being the installfest, which was open to all, although we did
sell quite a few memberships that day), and have never required
membership for those wanting help with Linux.

While there are a lot of Debian users on this list, there are also a
experts in SuSE, Mandrake, Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo and more.  It does
seem to be the case that a lot of the helpers at workshops are more
experienced with Debian than other distributions, but I know that I've
helped people using other distributions like Fedora or SuSE, and have
seen others such as Nick Bannon and Bernard Blackham do the same.

We're not here for inter-distribution rivalry, getting numbers,
converting people to Debian, or anything else.  We're just a group of
Linux users, as the name suggests -- people sharing a common interest.
The big bold statement at the top of the PLUG web site (can't remember
whether it was written by me or one of the previous webmasters) says:

    PLUG is the Perth Linux Users' Group, an association of people
    interested in Linux.  We aim to promote Linux and support the users
    of Linux in Perth, Western Australia.

This paragraph was scoffed at in some of the previous threads, but I
think it pretty much sums up what we're trying to achieve.  To start
with, we're a pretty loose group of people, with a lot of different
views on life, the universe and everything.  But somehow we muddle
through, doing Linuxy things.  PLUG as an organisation has helped
organise linux.conf.au 2003 (before my time) and last year held an
installfest.  This mailing list and the workshops _are_ a good source
of help for a lot of people, I see a lot of questions being answered
every week and very few going begging.

But more to the point, many PLUG's members are heavily involved in the
"Linux community" in one way or another.  Some of PLUG's members are
involved in promoting Linux in businesses and organisations, or
convincing government departments to support Linux better.  Others
(such as Harry) are involved in groups such as Computer Angels who
provide training to those without computer skills, and provide
refurbished donated computers - running Linux - to those who can't
afford one.

Well, this message has already become quite long so I'm going to chop
it off here.  Congratulations to anyone who read through to the end! (-:

Regards,

Cameron.