[Fedora-India] Queries regarding the Free media project in India

[Ankur Sinha]

On Wed, 2009-07-08 at 09:36 +0530, Rangeen Basu wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 9:09 AM, susmit
> shannigrahi<thinklinux.ssh at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > But we have a *lot* of LocalContacts, but does that fulfill any of the
> > freemedia requests?
> > I have not seen any.
> 
> Very true. Local contacts can serve requests which originate from
> within a rang of a few kilometres. Anything beyond that boils down to
> the same postage issue. Even the next city is out of reach for local
> contacts. People are not willing to travel and collect the media
> themselves. It is much easier for them to obtain a pirated Windows CD.
> 
> One alternative is to use VPP [1] . If we can keep some option as
> Susmit suggested, "I want to pay" or "I don't want to pay" and if free
> media is not "free as in free beer", then we can send the media
> through VPP and collect the money from India Post once the media is
> delivered. I am not sure though what will happen if the delivery is
> refused. According to India Post site, it will be returned to the
> sender and the sender needs to pay any "outstanding dues", not sure
> what outstanding dues mean but that can be found out easily. Once a
> freemedia request is accepted, the acceptor can mail the requester and
> take his confirmation before mailing the disc through VPP. In this way
> the chances of denial during delivery will be reduced a lot. The
> requester will have to pay approximately Rs 50 (cost of DVD +
> postage).
> 
> [1] http://www.indiapost.gov.in/Netscape/ValuePayableArticles.html
> 

hi,

This is a good suggestion, but I think we'll end up having a lot of
refusals :| . 

Rahul said that the number of media requests we service is comparitively
small. I'd like to know approximately how much this is:

@Rahul, what is to max number of free media requests that can be
serviced from "official" funds?

@others, how many requests have you serviced by *mail" (free media or
otherwise).

Since mailing media from anywhere to anywhere costs 25 rs, all media
being sent from one "free media center" (only one) will be the addition
of all the above counts. I'm hoping the number will be large enough to
"outsource the couriering/media replication etc to a separate agency if
they charge reasonable rates and would take care of it entirely"


-- 
regards,

Ankur