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22 May 2015

Please destroy LUG and start OSDG in your college.

Context- this post is taken from LUGIITD mailing list.
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I personally think that I also made a mistake.

8 year before, I named this group as linux user group. If I have access to time machine then I would have changed it to 'open source developer group'. OSDG.

There is big difference between both. Lug focus more on promotion and advocacy. Name and motivation of this group has affected life of many students. Now I personally realized that it was my mistake. Somebody should have told me that we are technical persons, software engineer and coding skills are our bread and butter. So having a open source developer group in technical college is most suitable.

FOSS coding group will automatically focus more coding hackthons and coding skills rather than just promoting Linux as alternate OS.

Concept of lug started long back and it adopted in many countries. It was a need of that time because linux users were facing many problems.

Now this is not use case at 2015. It is well adopted.
Having good coding skills will give you good job and money.

I still remember few year back I left my job and gave almost 2 year for promoting Linux. I was not having any idea that what i was doing. Nor I was having proper vision. Just like somebody cannot earn much by knowing window, same applies to Linux as well. Having good linux skill and little bit of admin skills will help in getting a good job. But not sufficient. Later I realised that software engineering is all about creating software and coding them using some programming language. Fortunately I was excellent coding skills too but never utilised at that time.

After 2 year of struggle and my startup got collapsed, my bank balance was negative. Huge debt. Finally I decided to join some company. I got a job and settled my life and wife. Now my salary is 7x what i was earning after my college graduation. Even Linus earn 10 million per year. Yes that's true.

I got good job because I was having good programming skill set. From last 4 years I totally away from lug but silently contributing my work on github. That  is the idle contributions expected from us and not long long email threads.

Even If you use Window to code open source stuff it will great. Lots of open source developer use Mac for development.

Almost every company use open source stuff. It may be like common library or framework.

Companies build solution for their customers. Customers pay for them.

So we must dismantle this group and start promoting open source developer group.

Or just rename it.

And we must work hard to correct this error. We must convey this message to all existing LUGs. Convincing then to convert to or rename as OSDG. Ask them start hackthons and collaborative coding programs. This will lead to better coders and developers. Eventually this will help to startup eco system.

For a technical student, code contributions is best way. And It should be the only way.

So that was the summery of my past 9 year experience.