Why LUGs Matter

[RoyGBiv]

Why LUGs matter
Friday March 10, 2006 (09:01 PM GMT)
By: Matthew Davidson

Virtually the same day I read Joe Barr's article "Do LUGs still matter?" I received an email message saying that someone was setting up a new Linux user group (LUG) in my hometown. I attended the first couple of meetings of this group with Joe's article in mind, and with the perspective of a free software advocate, not a Linux or open source advocate. The experience made me realize LUGs do still matter, perhaps more than ever, although for different reasons than they once did.

Work commitments kept me from going often, but I managed to attend maybe a dozen meetings of the Sydney Linux Users Group (SLUG) from the late 1990s up until a couple of years ago. SLUG meetings were an overwhelming experience. Well over a hundred people filled a university lecture theatre (or two) every month to socialise, share problems and solutions, and see presentations from people who looked at first glance like average university students but turned out to be stellar luminaries in the free software world.

Thanks to a presentation from Jeff Waugh, I changed overnight from a person who loathed GNOME and KDE to a person who only loathes KDE. I would never have persevered to the point where I actually got an OpenLDAP server working without a SLUG presentation by Anand Kumria about how cool LDAP really is. (Coolness is not LDAP's most immediately apparent quality.) And the SLUG mailing list remains a resource when Google fails to come up with the answers to my problems.

I've lost count of the times I've had difficulty with some piece of software only to find one of the package's developers on the SLUG list. I fancy that even if most Microsoft developers weren't uncredited drones, your chances of exclaiming, "Hey, I know this guy!" and resolving your problem with a quick email message would still be slight. You can't buy community in a shrink-wrapped box.

http://software.newsforge.com/software/06/03/03/1813216.shtml?tid=150