Bruce Perens's Slashdot debacle
I'm sure everybody has seen what happened when a mailinglist post by Bruce
Perens got "leaked" to Slashdot. I see part of the problem that the
"news" people are seeing a dearth of news from the Debian Project, so are
skimming the mailinglists as a substitute for timely information from the
Debian Project. For example, both Potato's attempted freeze and its
subsequent delay should've been released to various outlets while it was
still possible to "spin" the story, for want of a better term. Instead,
in both cases, the news got leaked out via the mailinglist posts, which
were written in technicalese and in an informal style that is fine for
mailinglists, but lousy for press releases. The next instance of the
dearth of information from the Debian Project causing damage actually
DID cause Bruce Perens possible legal damage and entirely too real damage
to his Good Name. My suggestion is that the Debian Project
nominates/elects (an) Official Spokesperson(s) to Slashdot, LWN, and all
the "geek news" outlets, said spokesperson to maintain membership in all
Debian mailinglists, and to provide timely, edited information about all
topics that may interest the relevant communities (the Linux community
most obviously, but the BSD community is saying many things about the
Debian/FreeBSD project based again on the information from mailinglists as
well, among others), and also tell the mailinglists affected what's going
out under their AEgis. Another idea that may have merit is to subdivide
the task either by interest group or list--a slashdot commentator, a LWN
commentator, etc. The outlets are already looking at the mailinglists,
the only thing we can do about it now is to provide a better alternative
than publicly airing what were supposed to be semi-private messages.
<a mailto:galt@inconnu.isu.edu>Who is John Galt?</a>
Failure is not an option. It comes bundled with your Microsoft product.
-- Ferenc Mantfeld
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