A seperate Political Based newsletter for Linux [LWN.net]

From:		roger <roger-AT-eskimo.com>
To:		lwn-AT-lwn.net, letters-AT-lwn.net
Subject:		A seperate Political Based newsletter for Linux
Date:		Mon, 10 May 2004 15:43:34 -0400

I don't know about you guys, but I certainly hate mixing Politics with
the top stories of Linux.

Stuff like, "Is Linux ready for the Desktop", "de Icaza: Rest of World
Will Force US Into Linux (OS News)", "Linux in Defense: Free Software is
Just Too Expensive" is just all a waste of text/ascii in my brief and
explicit opinion.

Can you please post this crap (bluntly stating the term -- some call it
FUD ;-) someplace else, such as a different section. One great idea
would be to use a seperate RSS feed for politics, (titled ie. "Linux in
Politics", etc)

I personally use the RSS feed available within Evolution mail client.
And seeing this political junk just kills my good mood at times. It's
sort of like the press trying to pick a fight (ie MS vs Linux, etc).
Press reports such as this only add some good amounts of high octane
fuel to the fire. It's something would even make good corp executes get
sick of hearing about, enough to push them over the edge as well.

A newspaper or magazine has different sections as well. So just a
thought here.

--

Roger
http://www.eskimo.com/~roger/index.html

(Log in to post comments)

A seperate Political Based newsletter for Linux

Posted May 13, 2004 3:30 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

I want to see the stories Roger is objecting to. Unfortunately, politics matters; we'll be set back considerably, for example, if badly drafted anti-P2P laws have the effect of shutting down SourceForge.

Now, that doesn't mean that I think that every story in LWN is worth the time to read. But I skip over the ones I don't care to read, and I wouldn't consider writing in to tell the LWN folks not to write them.

Politics matters.

Posted May 14, 2004 16:57 UTC (Fri) by dwheeler (subscriber, #1216) [Link]

Politics do matter, and politics will matter more in the future. Whether you like it or not, open source software / Free Software is now in the big leagues, and that means that some large organizations (particularly competitors) will be interested in manuevers to prevent or inhibit its use.

That being said, a way to mark such articles (so people who don't want them can ignore them) makes sense.

A seperate Political Based newsletter for Linux

Posted May 13, 2004 8:00 UTC (Thu) by TheOneKEA (subscriber, #615) [Link]

I believe the political stories should stay on the front page, but be flagged either under the "Legal issues" heading or a new heading (if they already aren't).

A seperate Political Based newsletter for Linux

Posted May 13, 2004 15:43 UTC (Thu) by alspnost (subscriber, #2763) [Link]

I think RSS is your problem - if you view the LWN web site, you can tweak your preferences to leave out news stories in certain categories. Isn't this all you want?

A seperate Political Based newsletter for Linux

Posted May 14, 2004 9:06 UTC (Fri) by Quazatron (subscriber, #4368) [Link]

I have to agree with Roger, the technical and political aspects should be separated. I really like to read the technical articles and sometimes the political ones, but there are times when I think "not *another* is-linux-ready-for-the-desktop article"! I hardly ever bother to set my preferences, so I didn't realise the news items had categories. I'll have to look into that. :-)

Also I think RSS feeds are A Good Thing, and I love my NewsMonster aggregator, it polls the websites for me and saves me the trouble of having to monitor about 29 sites. Only when an article raises my curiosity I visit the site.

Having said that, I have no trouble ignoring is-linux-ready-for-the-desktop or ms-is-evil articles on RSS so I don't think I need separated newsfeeds.

A seperate Political Based newsletter for Linux

Posted May 14, 2004 21:42 UTC (Fri) by lovelace (subscriber, #278) [Link]

Those stories, on average, are probably the ones I read the most so I would prefer them to stay
right where they are.