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Re: [RFR] Press release about Debian on public clouds



TL;DR: please comment on whether you think announcing Amazon/Azure image
availability now, and calling for help, is a good idea or not.

On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 01:29:56PM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
> I would like to express my dissatisfaction again, without friendly
> words as it seems that you are determined to push a press release
> without asking first if it would be helpful or not.

As far as I can tell this assumption of yours is wrong. I proposed to
the press team a press release because, yes, I thought that is useful.
But I surely didn't want to do that without the consent of this place.
Otherwise nobody would have bothered asking for comments here. I'm sorry
if the deadline and such sounded "definitive" to you, but that's simply
due to internal work-flows of the press team; please do not take them as
an attempt to pressure anyone and, for the time being, forget about
them.

Now, let's go back to step 1. In the first iteration of the proposed
text, the main criticism (AOL'd by many people on this list) had been on
the private-vs-public recommendation part. So I've worked to address it.
I notice that in this last reply of yours you don't mention it at all.
Can I conclude that you consider it satisfactorily addressed?

Step 2 is the communication strategy. I do think that *now* is a right
moment to send out a "press release" (see below for what I mean with
it), because while we do have a couple of products (Amazon and Azure
images), and while we do have a group of people here working on them, we
seem to be relatively stuck. Partly it is do to the Wheezy release, I
agree with you on that. But partly is also because we have made no step
yet to inform the world about them and encourage participation: we have
mentioned them only on d-d-a (various mails of mine), and we haven't yet
documented them on the www.d.o website.

According to my experience in Free Software, communicating about what
you're doing, and letting people use something, even if half-baked, is a
great way to attract: 1) interest, and 2) more working force to improve
it further. I do agree these products are half-baked but,
communication-wise, using that as a reason not to announce their
availability is not wise. It would be much better to advertise their
existence, with all the appropriate disclaimers about their state.

Regarding the notion of "press release", it's an entry in Debian News.
It's basically an announcement at large, not only to Debian Developers
(which we have already informed about this in the past), but also to our
users.

All that said, I do not see this as _my_ press release, I spent some
time working on it hoping to do something useful for debian-cloud
activities. If there is no consensus on the fact that the announcement
is useful, let's drop it. Looking at the thread thus far, it seems to me
that most of the objections where on the private-vs-public issue, which
AFAICT is now solved. Please voice your comments in the thread on
whether it is something you (plural) consider useful or not, so that we
can decide what to do.

> Sorry again to be unfriendly, but I hope that it helps to be clear.

Being unfriendly doesn't help, no. Everything else you wrote, yes. I
think you could have achieved a much better result by writing what you
wrote, but using a friendlier tone.

Cheers.
-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli  . . . . . . .  zack@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o
Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o
Debian Project Leader . . . . . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o .
« the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »

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