Re: KLUG Meeting Notes - 09/26/2000

[Adam Tauno Williams <adam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>I. verview of Linux Advocacy and Resources:
>  A.  Professionalism -
>      /usr/doc/HOWTO/mini/Advocacy (in you Linux system)
>  B.  Media Relations -
>      http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~conradp/linux/pr/

Bob did a geat job with this topic, but I didn't get
a chance to interject one point I've learned from 
dealing with "media" organizations about Open Source
projects that explains why they get things wrong on
such a frequent basis.  Most media organs seem to be
familair with the commercial development model that
results in some suit getting behind a podiom at a 
press conference and making a "official" statement.
This doesn't happen {often} in the Open Source world
and reporter type people really struggle to know 
what's going on,  and "snapshotting" traffic on a 
maillist for a week or so can result in a very scewed
view of things.

For example I can almost promise that within the next
couple of weeks some publications somewhere will say
that the Samba project is dead,  WinY2k functionality
will not be available and that the Australian team
detonated due to personality problems.  If you've 
been on the Samba-ntdom or developers lists the last
few days you'll know why.  But none of the above
statements is true,  Samba is alive and under rapid
development, the team is quite intact.  But it a 
journalist chose that point in time to check out
Samba they'd see things like "The Samba TNG source
tree isn't dormant, it's dead.  No one is working 
on it." along with people claiming that Samba 
wasn't truly Open Source, etc... all based upon
knee-jerk reactions by dozens of people who didn't
understand that the Samba-TNG tree was born to die
and was a fork to study PDC and WinY2k without the
burden of "production code".  Feature support is
bieng "back" ported in to the production code.

The whole point of my rant is to encourage people to
have a little mercy on media organs,  they're still
trying to figure out how who report on something as
distributed and shifting as Open Source.

> Space & Time Coordinates:
> The Universe During The Holocene Period of Planet Earth 

Don't you think these directions are a little vague.  It
could take the Borg having to assimilate billions of 
people till they actually find the KLUG meeting.  Obviously
they're strong supporters of Open Source.

Systems and Network Administrator
Morrison Industries
1825 Monroe Ave NW.
Grand Rapids, MI. 49505