Simon Stelling posted <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, excerpted below, on Sun, 06 Feb 2005 12:37:55 +0100:
> 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. > >> [] 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. Agreed. Speaking of GWN... A bit of positive feedback... As I was reading the last one, in particular the "Heard in the Community" section where it lists references to the threads of interest on the forums and in user and dev, I was thinking how nice it is to get that review once a week. Of those, I only read dev regularly, but even, or perhaps particularly for it, I appreciate the thread features. That short little GWN summary is a nice way to review the discussions that have happened that week and often get a bigger-picture view than I would have otherwise. Reading it, I often realize that in reading the individual detail of each post in the thread, I've failed to see the overall picture as clearly as I might, particularly on the larger threads, and I definitely appreciate that GWN summary of the thread or two it covers. There are certainly other things of interest in GWN each week, but it's worth my time reading it on that reason alone, even if the others didn't exist. I really appreciate what has become to me a valuable service in that weekly summary. I must admit, reading back in those threads as linked from GWN, not all posts portray Gentoo in the most positive light possible, and I could see that as one possible point of debate re GWN and that summary. However, I believe the above position covers it pretty well. Yes, that's in some way what the community sees of Gentoo, but yes, we ARE strong enough to present our bad side in the form of some of those posts with the good, even if it IS what the public sees. In part because we are a community distribution, sure, but it's more than that. Putting those discussions on public display demonstrates honesty and integrity both with ourselves, and with the community we are a part of, and is IMO a very good thing. For those who are put off by Gentoo because of it... well, maybe that's for the best, anyway. I can't begin to express how much the difference in demonstrated attitude between Gentoo and the would-be fork impressed me, when I looked into it as I considered joining Gentoo. At every point along the way, it seemed Gentoo was dealing with integrity, while the person making the accusations seemed to be pointing in a mirror. That Gentoo continues to deal with the community in integrity so by continually featuring its most heated dev list discussions on GWN, can only be a positive, IMO. BTW, take a guess what it was that first attracted my attention to Gentoo. It was the repeated sourcing of the Gentoo lists discussion of the xfree breakup and the switch to xorg, as the most informed and most public discussions of the issues involved, on LWN and other community news sites. If it hadn't been for that very public and painful debate, I'd likely have likely ended up on Debian or Fedora's amd64, instead of on Gentoo's. From there, I began following GWN, also as published on LWN, and when it became clear that Mandrake wasn't going to be able to keep a timely amd64 release, it was only natural to find Gentoo at the top of my short list, particularly after reading the 2004.0 announcement in GWN on LWN, featuring the latest KDE on AMD64, while Mandrake was two KDE releases behind on the platform. The contrast between Gentoo's philosophy and social contract, as I'd already seen them in action from the GWN list coverage, and that of its fork as set forth on their own pages, soon settled the issue, subject only to the technicalities of compatibility and installation, which I hadn't researched yet. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman in http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html -- [email protected] mailing list
