Re: Bruce Perens's Slashdot debacle
John Galt wrote:
> 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.
I think you're profoundly underestimating the influence of DWN. Nearly
everything that appears in LWN about debian, and about 50% of what appears
in slashdot about debian refers to DWN. So if you want something "spun", you
mostly just need to get DWN to spin it. Which might be difficult, as I
dislike trying to put a spin on things and try to report objectively and
factually.
Like it or not, debian is an open project.
--
see shy jo, editor, Debian Weekly News
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