No revisionism, please

No revisionism, please

Posted Nov 6, 2003 20:52 UTC (Thu) by rickmoen (subscriber, #6943)
In reply to: why not some common sense? by ccyoung
Parent article: Will the real Linux Gazette please stand up?

ccyoung wrote:

Why not recognize that both needs - a high quality monthly and a more interactive format - are both legitmate?

As Jim Dennis notes, your assumption that the Linux Gazette editors don't is incorrect. We're just trying to deal with the situation we have.

At the time we made our final decision to thank SSC for it's generous seven years of assistance and move Linux Gazette to new hosting, we'd been getting the clear message from Mr. Hughes and his webmaster that they intended to move to having only dynamic content, no monthly issues, and no editors. So, it seemed at that time necessary to move Linux Gazette if it were to continue as a magazine at all. Only after we announced our departure to them (Oct. 28) did SSC reverse policies and hurriedly assemble the rather thin November issue now observable at their site — the one that also purports to be the November Gazette. Hold that thought, please, and bear in mind the situation we were dealing with at the time.

In addition, we found that past issues (not just issue #95, Jon) had been retroactively censored without notice to (or discussion with) the staff — before or after: Requests that they explain that censorship went unanswered. Frequent contributors had started withholding articles because of what was going on between us and SSC management, and overall quality and quantity of material had noticeably declined. And the CMS, when it appeared (initially, with no magazine issue attached) just as we were mailing our departure letter, started housing past LG articles stripped of both author attributions and author copyright notices — which they mostly fixed after we politely pointed this out, though two examples remain of where SSC has wrongfully replaced authors' copyright notices with its own.

So, we gracefully thanked SSC and departed, asking for their help in an orderly transition, and for them to please assign their CMS site some other name and eventually sign over the linuxgazette.com domain -- since at the time their announced intentions were to not publish a magazine on it.

What would be truly constructive would be for SSC to follow through on their original intentions to do something radically different from the Linux Gazette magazine. That might with time become something truly great, and we at Linux Gazette would applaud it. Or, if they want to carry through with their newer policy and publish a magazine, that's perfectly fine with us too. We regret their decision to persist in using a confusing name, and wish they wouldn't do that, but we aren't likely to (say) make legal threats over that.

In general, our attitude is best described as "Two Linux sites instead of one? Good. They're different? Even better."

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