I don't really want to be a slashdot apologist, but it is one of the top sites I visit. The goof was sort of like reporting the wrong candidate has won the presidential election, no wait the major news outlets do that roughly 10% of the time(pre-1900 doesn't count since they didn't announce the results before the official results). Slashdot also isn't really a traditional news outlet, they are a news aggregator who provides a forum for feedback about the news. Contrary to what the trolls would have you believe, you are encouraged to follow the links in stories to see the whole story. In this case, you would, like I did, follow the link to MusicCity and notice that the source is indeed available for download or do you believe everything you see on the news at face value? Also, even after downloading the source it was not immediately obvious as to whether the source was actually for Morpheus and not the unchanged source since their was no README detailing the changes or whatever and it was still called Gnucleus. People actually had to do non-trivial analysis to determine that it was indeed the Morpheus source. Since slashdot is primarily an agregator and not a reporting group...
DeMoN LaG wrote: > Travis Crump <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in > [EMAIL PROTECTED]">news:[EMAIL PROTECTED], on 13 Mar 2002: > > >>And you will also note that by the tenth comment, people were >>already correcting the story and an update was posted within an >>hour or two. Overall the system works pretty well. > > > Overall, I don't think that is a solution. Would you care if the > news ran a thing tonight saying "Hey, Travis Crump robbed a bank > today", and then 20 minutes later said "Oh, sorry, we messed up, no > he didn't". You don't run stories without facts. Hell, I can't even > legally say "Mr. Smith killed two people last night", even if there > is video of him doing it and every time he is in public he says > "Yeah, I killed them". I have to say "Mr. Smith alledgedly killed > two people". This is absolutely no different. /. said, flat out, > "Morpheus violates the GPL", which is basically saying Music City is > breaking the law and stealing code, when they did nothing wrong. > It's flat out a lie. How exactly would one come to the conclusion > Music City wasn't following the GPL? The GPL states that source must > be made available. Not it must be included with the binary. Couple > of idiots wanting to get a big name for themselves probably saw the > source wasn't included with the binary, never bothered to see the > huge "Source Code" link off the main page of Morpheus and went > straight to press. If my local paper had done that, they'd have been > sued. I see no reason why /. is exempt from this. The fact they are > an online news site shouldn't exempt them from checking facts before > running stories. >
