Recently there has been some discussion about the "official" nature of the GWN. Is the GWN an official Gentoo newsletter that promotes Gentoo, or is it a quasi-independent newsletter that is free to criticize as well as evangelize? The GWN is hosted on the Gentoo servers, it has a Gentoo copyright notice, and the editor is a Gentoo dev, but the majority of the writing is done by the Gentoo community, not the developers, so it's hardly surprising that both our devs and our users are unclear about where the GWN fits in. My personal opinion is that we should encourage the GWN to be as independent as possible.
I have to admit that I assumed that when the GWN preview posts to -core went away that it was deliberate on the part of the editors to assert their independence. Good idea, I'd thought, since by being (mostly) independent the GWN belongs to the community much more than it does to the developers. Moreover, independence allows the GWN to truly be the GW News, not the GW Propaganda. Consequently, the GWN is likely to publish stories not just about things that are going well, but also about things that go wrong, and such reporting keeps us honest. Of course, just like with any press the GWN will sometimes not get all of the facts quite right. That's okay; it's what retractions and letters to the editor are for! I have to admit that I'd forgotten that the GWN was part of Gentoo PR, and in retrospect I think that's a mistake. Instead, I believe that it would be better if the GWN were not a Gentoo project at all. I fully support using Gentoo resources to host the GWN, but we should be doing so at their request, along with an explicit promise that Gentoo will never censor the GWN, either in whole or in part. (To the best of my knowledge Gentoo never has done so, but we should put the promise in writing.) My thoughts, for whatever they're worth. -g2boojum- -- Grant Goodyear Gentoo Developer [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.gentoo.org/~g2boojum GPG Fingerprint: D706 9802 1663 DEF5 81B0 9573 A6DC 7152 E0F6 5B76
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