On September 8th, 2005, Kingsly John published an open letter to the Linux/Open Source community, making a number of allegations against the organisers of FOSS.IN, Linux Bangalore and about the Bangalore Linux Users Group.
This document, prepared in collaboration with the managers of Linux Bangalore and FOSS.IN, represents our reply to Kingsly John's statements.
The original "open letter" contains a number allegations and points which, in summary, state the following:
In addition, there have been allegations of financial impropriety, including the misappropriation of funds belonging to the BLUG.
Here is our reply to these allegations:
We accept that we branded the lists as "Linux Bangalore", in order to create awareness for the event that had been planned. We continue to believe that this was acceptable and harmed no one, least of all the BLUG, which received intense publicity because of this.
The lists have never belonged to the BLUG, and have never claimed to represent the BLUG - see this message for a clear statement about this in 2001. Similarly, the domains "linux-bangalore.org/.com/.net" have never actually belonged to the BLUG - they were all purchased by Atul Chitnis and paid for by him and other well wishers. None of the people who sponsored the domain names were ever led to believe that "Linux Bangalore" was anything more than a forthcoming event, and a brand name for the same. The BLUG has never been known as "Linux Bangalore", and the BLUG's webpages were simply hosted on linux-bangalore.org (earlier, they were hosted on cbconsulting.com and on exocore.com). Nor have the audited accounts of the BLUG ever shown any assets.
Kingsly John claims that he was unaware of the BLUG and the LB event being different things, and that the event was organised by the BLUG, not by a separate team of people. Here is a message, which has been taken from the LB managers private list, posted by him. Item 4 in this message proves that he knew about the fact that LB and the BLUG were not the same thing, and that he was very much in favour for a more public differentiation between the two.
The BLUG society was never closed, and is very much alive, though we had at one point begun proceedings to shut it down. Kingsly John was well aware of every minute detail related to this, and was part of all discussions in 2003 related to this. When we began the shutdown procedure, backdated papers were needed which had to be signed by Kingsly, as he was a member of the board during 2002. He signed these papers in 2004.
The allegations of financial impropriety were equally false. Audited accounts for the years in question for the society can be seen here: 2003-2004 and 2004-2005. They clearly show that at the beginning of the financial year 2002-2003 (when Kingsly John was still part of the LB team), the net amount available in the account was Rs.295,929. After the 2003 event (which ran into a loss, but was bailed out by these reserves), the amount left was Rs.7,975. After the 2004 event, a net profit of about Rs.125,944 was made, and that this money (minus some legal service fees of about Rs.8,000) is still very much in the bank account after all these years. Of this, about Rs.15,000 will have to be paid as audit fees for three years, leaving about Rs.100,000.
It should be noted that under society laws, we were never bound to "publish" accounts to anyone but society members, of which there are seven. The fact that we wold-published the accounts in 2003 and again now is simply a gesture from our side to prove that Kingsly John's allegations are false.
It may be of interest as to why we had to pay legal fees. They were related to our having to take a legal opinion to avoid having to pay taxes on the money we had received. This was necessary because the BLUG society had never received tax exemption - a fact known to Biju Chacko (when he got the society registered) and his successor - Kingsly John - during his tenure as BLUG coordinator, but not revealed to the LB team until just before his departure from the team.
In addition, Kingsly John had taken possession of all the accounts papers for the 2002 event to get them processed by his auditor. He then went out of town, and became unavailable, even though he knew that we had to file accounts on or before the 30th of September, 2003. We repeatedly asked him to return the papers, but to no avail. He eventually returned the account papers in October 2003, without any audit having been done.
These two issues placed the event in great jeopardy, and we had to seek legal opinions, else we would have faced a huge tax bill (estimated at about Rs.150,000).
In an attempt to get Kingsly John's notice when he refused to answer phone calls or email, we deliberately removed him from the managers and moderator lists, knowing that he would certainly not miss this. Sure enough, he finally responded, but instead of apologising for letting the team down, he lashed out at people. As a result, Kingsly John was removed from the LB management team in October 2003.
We got the 2002-2003 accounts audited by Jessica Prabhakar's auditor, and published them during Linux Bangalore/2003 in the form of a booklet that was received by each of the thousands of event participants.
The Bangalore Linux User Group was (and is) a group of enthusiasts, passionate about Linux and other Free and Open Source (FOSS) technologies and ideologies. It was never registered as a formal organisation in its initial days.
In the year 2000, it became necessary to create a legal entity to be "sponsorable" for Bangalore IT.COM 2000. Originally, this was to have been another organisation, but since the BLUG was the "LUG on the spot", it was the BLUG that needed to get registered.
The BLUG was registered as a society with a minium quorum of 7 members. The defining document for this was a "Memorandum of Association" that can be seen here. While this is a perfectly legitimate document, it contained what could be termed as "legal fiction". See this message for an explanation of this.
It should be noted that the BLUG society was NOT created for the purpose of Linux Bangalore.
The concept of an independent event for the community was formed by the people who organised the community's presence at Bangalore IT.COM and Bang!inux. A trial run of this was run during Bangalore IT.COM 2000, where we held talks at the J.N.Tata auditorium while Bangalore IT.COM was on. In June 2001, we announced that we would be doing an independent event, and that this event would happen in September 2001. Kiran "Jace" Jonnalagadda took on the responsibility to coordinate this event.
By early August 2001, it became clear that we could not count on Kiran or the original team that was to put together the event. Absence from meetings, non-completion of tasks, not even a budget, etc. led to the abandonment of the idea.
In mid August 2001, however, it was decided that we would attempt to run the event after all. However this time, instead of banking on a huge, otherwise unmotivated group of people, we narrowed the list down to a small set of people, whose names can be seen at here. Most of the team members were also BLUG members, but the event itself was deemed as "facilitated by the BLUG", not organised by it. The event was announced to be held in December 2001, at the August BLUG meet.
This team successfully staged LB/2001 in December 2001. We did this without having to create a bank account, as our sponsor paid all the bills related to the event directly. The BLUG society played no role in LB/2001.
No bank account was needed from 2000 to 2002, nor was one created.
However, in 2002, we found that we would need a bank account for the event, as event sponsors preferred paying money to us to cover costs of the event. So, in October 2002, a bank account was opened. As we had no formal organization available, we used the dummy BLUG society for this purpose. This was known to the team of LB/2002, which can be seen here, and specifically Kingsly John, who was the BLUG coordinator at that time, and even had the account opened in an SBI branch near his office to make it easy for him to access it.
LB/2002 was again conducted with great success, and due credit was given to the BLUG for having facilitated it, by noting this fact prominently on all banners displayed at the event, and by publicly thanking the BLUG for its help during the closing ceremony. Kingsly John was personally responsible for the design and printing of these banners which showed the role of the BLUG in the event. Some of these banners can be seen here.
The next two events, LB/2003 and LB/2004, were conducted by essentially the same team that conducted the previous events. However, in 2003, the team, by mutual consent, decided not list the team member before the event, as considerable amounts of politics were arising, and team members did not want to be targeted. The team list should have been published after the event, but due to an oversight was not. This oversight has since been rectified, and the team list can be seen here.
During LB/2004, we announced that we would be broadening the scope of the event to include all FOSS technologies (not just Linux). This required us to find a new name for the event, which was announced in mid-2005 - the event was renamed to FOSS.IN - thereby removing the "Linux-only" stigma, and also making the event independent of the location it would be held in (by removing the "Bangalore" from the name).
FOSS.IN/2005 was conducted, and was a huge success for participants, though at a huge personal cost to the organisers.
With the increasing politicization of the BLUG by interested parties, it was decided in 2003 that the society be shut down, as it served no purpose. Because of mitigating circumstances, this action was delayed till 2004.
By 2004, there had been several changes to the society member roster, and the final list of members was
In this list, the primary change from the year before was that Kartik replaced Kingsly in the member roster.
Of the above, a legal majority (i.e. people who were physically available) signed the papers required to shut down the society. Some backdated paperwork needed to be done as well, and this required Kingsly John's signatures. He signed these papers with full knowledge that they were required to close down the society.
The papers to close the society were never submitted, for no other reason that by then everyone was busy with LB/2004.
FOSS.IN/2005 did not need the use of the BLUG bank account as by then a separate account for the conference had been opened.
Just before FOSS.IN/2005, Kingsly John published his misleading "open letter", causing immense damage to the community, as people did not know what to believe. We chose not to reply to his "open letter" at that time as we did not want to indulge in a "he-said-we-said" battle - we really had a lot of other things on our minds.
However we believe that it is now necessary to respond, and we have chosen to publish our evidence.
While we have been earnest in our approach, there have been several mistakes that we have committed:
We hope that this matter is now at rest.
This document has been created and is signed by the group of managers primarily responsible for the creation and running of Linux Bangalore 2001-2004 and/or FOSS.IN/2005
Bangalore, May 1st, 2006.