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  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
  
  Cartoon artwork created with Stripgenerator; dialogue copy/pasted from #ubuntu-offtopic on Freenode.
  

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The best part of free software is community support of course. Whatever your problem, someone will surely be able and willing to help. However, not all problems can be helped in support channels. Most importantly, almost no problem has been successfully fixed in #ubuntu-offtopic! mc44 disagrees with topyli and gord, but that’s just what he does.

On technical IRC channels, mailing lists, Usenet groups (remember those?) and Web forums, you often learn a lot of interesting and useful stuff. If you hang in there for long enough, you’re going to learn some more universal truths as well. I have learned a couple of things that I think i may have tweeted about some time or another, but would like to document here too, for future application.

topyli’s law:
When a user asks for help on a problem (s)he is having with $PROGRAM, another user will immediately suggest they switch to $ANOTHER_PROGRAM and use that instead.

topyli’s second law:
When you add an “Advanced” button or tab in the configuration dialog for your $USER_INTERFACE, all your users immediately become advanced.

The second law is actually a special case of mahen23′s law, which I learned on #ubuntu-offtopic. Here it is:
If you create a button, people will press it.

Today, the Finnish Linux User Group[1] announced their yearly Linux Contributor Award. The Winner: Ubuntu Suomi! Translating from the press release (Finnish PDF).

The volunteer community has taken care of translations, arranged events around the country, promoted Linux and Free Software to legislators and, above all, provided user support through its web forum.

Mirv accepting the prize.
(Photo from the ubuntu-fi blog)

Congratulations to our most excellent LoCo Team!

Two honorable mentions were awarded as well. One was given to the Linux.fi wiki. The choice further emphasizes the great importance that peer-provided support and documentation has for the success of Free Software. The other one went to Monty Widenius, the founder of MySQL. Yes, in case you didn’t know, he is yet another Finn helping build the tools for our road to software freedom. :) Altough MySQL is not directly related to LInux, as one of the pillars of the near-ubiqutuous LAMP stack, its success is very much tied to that of Linux.

Cheers to these Honored Ones too!

[1] Yes, there is only one. It is a small country :)

One of the strong points of using free systems such as Linux and Ubuntu in particular is the community support. When you have a bug to report, or a question to ask, you don’t have to call Microsoft and hope somebody will care. We care! This was demonstrated on #ubuntu-offtopic today. DrNick1 asked a question, topyli and NickGarvey helped immediately.