Friday, June 29, 2012: How can you make open source technology a common name? Simple… take it to every place where computing exists. Puduvai Linux User Group (PuduvaiLUG) thought of following the same concept when they thought of taking Ubuntu to an Internet center. They sensed the opportunity and took Ubuntu to a local cyber café where not only can people visiting the place get a sense of the operating system but also is a cost-effective business model for the cyber café owners.
Speaking about this initiative, Prasanna Venkadesh, co-ordinator of PuduvaiLUG said, “We (PuduvaiLUG) were meeting up and discussing things about GNU/Linux and things around it. We felt this is not enough as the public was unaware about these discussions. In order to take the importance of using Free Software to build a good eco-system for the society, we thought of taking open source to Internet centres around the city. Internet Centres could be the best place to start with as this is a place where number of people would visit daily and we can find different age grouped people. We have installed Ubuntu on their computers, which is far more responsive and cheap than any proprietary OS. Apart from it, it addresses their security woes.”

The journey began with Sri Venkateshwara Internet Browsing Center and the group aims to reach as many cyber cafés as possible. “It’s always easy to introduce a new thing to someone, but convincing them to use it is surely a hard task. We represented points like : GNU/Linux is virus-free, so any customer in the internet centre can use his USB drives without any fear of loss of data and even café owners will not have problem of virus; the operating system is absolutely free which means they don’t have to worry about licences and don’t need to a product key, etc.”

Seeing this initiative and the benefits of installing GNU/Linux, PuduvaiLUG has got many favourable responses from other cyber cafés as well. Venkadesh said, “We have a thought of developing a customised version of Ubuntu, which should be ideal for the usage in Internet Centres.”