I’m smiling right now. I just discovered that FOSS Force has some compassionate and generous readers.
I heard from Ken Starks with the Reglue project yesterday. He has his 12 Geeks of Christmas. This is great! It means that 12 school kids who’ve been trying to keep up with their school work without the benefit of computers will return from winter break with that obstacle overcome. What’s more, they’ll have a leg-up because the computers they’re receiving will be loaded with a special school kids version of Linux.
I wrote on Friday about Reglue, a nonprofit that refurbishes old computers, loads them up with GNU/Linux and the necessary software, then gives them to school age children who’s parents can’t afford a decent computer. I also told you about their 12 Geeks of Christmas campaign, in which Reglue was seeking a dozen Linux geeks to step up to the plate and agree to find a home for a Reglue computer.
“Find a truly disadvantaged family with school-aged children and place a computer in that child’s home…
“We’ll ship you the computer…you simply do the delivery, setup and brief session on how to use it.”
At the time the campaign had been going for nearly a week and nobody had yet signed up. It was beginning to look like this was a good idea that was going to die on the vine, which would’ve been too bad. To seed the pot, I signed FOSS Force up for the project and wrote about it.
Yesterday, just three days after the article appeared here on FOSS Force, I received an email for Ken Starks, the head honcho with Reglue.
“Well, that worked…we have our 12 geeks of Christmas.”
This was great news. 12 children will return to school after Christmas with a Linux box to help them with their school work.
This morning I learned from Ken that eight of the twelve geeks he found came from FOSS Force readers who responded to the article we ran. That’s very gratifying. I’ve always known we have some great people following our site, now I’ve got evidence on just how great you are.
My thanks go out to all of you.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
