Hi,
Grant Goodyear wrote:
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.
To me, the GWN always looked like an official newsletter with the mission to inform the users about what's going on in Gentoo. In fact, it is announced on the main page of gentoo.org, has the Gentoo copyright and so on, so it seems pretty official.
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!
Just because it is official that doesn't mean we have to censor it and remove everything that shows up errors. Happily, we aren't a company that has to sell products if it doesn't want to bankrupt, so we don't have that pressure.
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.)
Censorship is evil, so that would be a fair deal. Anyway, it should stay official.
Greetings,
blubb
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