On Sat, 2005-02-05 at 23:18 -0600, Grant Goodyear wrote: Hi,
> 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. > Either way does not matter for me. What I do wonder however, is that if it is decided that it should be seen as independent, that it would not be a good idea to have with each release a _clear_ disclaimer at the top saying that. If not, everybody not reading much more GWN, will just assume it is not acting independently ... > 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! > Well, that depends if those letters/retractions are actually issued. Independent or not, if you are reporting half-truths or leaving something out to appear as something else, then nobody is going to think of you as a reliable source of news (I am not saying GWN are doing these things!). Also, while it should not enable anybody to retract something they do not like, posting it first to -core or maybe even -dev should help to at least verify that something is not mis-reported ... Don't understand me wrong - if something is black, report it so, if they want to say I am a hard-headed donkey, fine. But if they say I am a bloated chimp, I will have words with them ;p > 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.) > I do not think anybody will either way demand that we retract hosting for them either way ... Cheers, -- Martin Schlemmer Gentoo Linux Developer, Desktop/System Team Developer Cape Town, South Africa
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part
