Linux user group

In fact, there is anecdotal evidence of traditional user groups having difficulty adapting to Linux's ability to be lawfully copied at will.

[1] LUGs typically meet once per month, in facilities freely provided by universities, colleges, community centers, private corporations, or banquet rooms in restaurants.

Some LUGs are informal conferences or round table discussions; members simply sit around and chat about Linux-related topics.

Often, LUG meetings provide an opportunity for members and guests to make announcements, especially for jobs offered and/or wanted, pleas for assistance (free or professional consulting), and hardware for sale or to be given away "to a good home".

For example, in Central America, in 2009, the first Encuentro Centro Americano de Software Libre was held in Nicaragua, where LUGs from the region, from Belize to Panama, attended.

As a second example, several Los Angeles-area LUGs sponsor and staff the annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) conference.

For example, the Uganda Linux User Group[4] operates in 3 major cities and frequently coordinates national and international events that have featured guests as high-profile as Tim Berners-Lee[citation needed].

LUGs sometimes are gifted with surplus books, back issues of Linux magazines, copies of CDs/DVDs, and other promotional items to give away to their members.

Members often exchange e-mail addresses, URLs, and phone numbers, and provide technical support or collaborate on study or development projects together.

It is generally an advocacy and community-building event, where novices bring their computers along with their preferred operating system installation disks to the location of the installfest, and experienced users help them in getting started and troubleshooting problems.

Writing in the BBC's Internet Blog in 2008, George Wright described a mini-installfest as being "as painless as [he]'d imagined" and "[with] a bit of luck, it can be straightforward".

Online LUGs use mailing lists, bulletin boards, and IRC as their primary method of communication, with members meeting physically seldom or not at all.

As with local LUGs, some groups are limited to technical discussions and others seek to form social bonds between Linux users by having "chat" or "off topic" forums.

An EC-funded study (2006) summarized in the Flosspols report,[16] indicates that about 1.5% of FLOSS community members were female, compared with 28% in proprietary software.