Hi Jos, first of all, I appreciate your feedback on *OUR* Weekly News. What we really have to fear is neither proprietary software nor competitor, but a lack of interest. ;-) (2010/10/28 7:37), Jos Poortvliet wrote:
Hi all,
A while ago there was a blog by Nelson on LibreOffice. I had a quick look and thought 'Ok so you don't get the dynamics of Free Software huh'* but didn't think about it otherwise.
Then the blog was selected as one of the articles in the Weekly News, put together by the hard work of Sascha and his team. Which tickled of some rough feathers at the LibreOffice camp - as you can imagine after reading the blog. There was a link to an article putting down the LibreOffice efforts (part of openSUSE!) - in an 'official' openSUSE news article!
So, I don't really want to discuss the blogpost itself - it's the personal vision of Nelson and I get the point he was trying to get across).
Even if his critisism was completely founded and sensible, the question I have is: should it have been in the Weekly news? That is actually something Nelson can surely comment upon: does it make sense, from a marketing perspective, to put your 'dirty laundry' (internal discussions and critisism) out to the world if you don't have too?
Frankly, I have had this discussion in KDE as well - some argued that even on Planet KDE, critisism did not belong. Planet, as they saw it, was a communicationchannel OUTWARDS. If you had critique, say it on a mailinglist or in private, use planet for positive comments. I disagreed with that - imho planet is for community discussion and personal views, hence should be open for critisism.
But for something like the weekly news, I think it might make sense for the team doing it to think about what their purpose is - yes, informing the community. But those part of it or very close most likely do follow the planet. The weekly news is most likely read by users further away from the project and journalists and such - who don't have to be bothered by infighting or bad news ;-)
Yes, I am saying the Weekly News is a great marketing asset - and hence should be treated as such.
Comments? As usual, feel free to disagree and fall all over me now - but please end it with a hug :D
From one of the editors point of view, it is not so easy to determine whether an article is appropriate for our Weekly News or not. In other words, whether an article is just a neutral report on what's going on or authors opinion isn't sometimes quite clear. And, the borderline between constructive opinions and offensive criticisms is often vague. In our 'Guiding Principles', http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Guiding_principles there's a mention: "We value... [...] ... respect for other persons and their contributions, for other opinions and beliefs. (...)" Everyone has his/her own opinion. When there's a topic, there always are various opinions and thoughts on that - pros and cons, positive and negative. If a opinion is constructive from one's point of view, it might be ridiculous from others' point of view. And according to our 'Kick Ass!' rule, everyone can add articles which (s)he find worthy enough to introduce to Weekly News during editing phase. So the question is, who can judge whether each entry is good for our Weekly News or not, and how? Should we reject all the articles which include authors criticism no matter how that is constructive or negative? The solution might be having an 'editorial meeting' for each issue. But I'm sorry to inform you the current state of Weekly News team. :-( ATM, most of the articles on Weekly News except 'openSUSE Forums' and 'Events' (thanks, Carl and Okuro!) are selected by Sascha and me. And yes, we pick up many articles which are aggregated on Planet openSUSE. Usually, we have a 'proofreading session' for each issue after the draft edition is completed. The more proofreaders we have, the more polished Weekly News will be - but right now, we have only one proofreader (me). And let me explain the situation of Issue 146. Since Sascha attended openSUSE Conference and didn't have enough time to edit, most of the articles on Issue 146 are selected by me and we couldn't have a proofreading session for that. However, even if we could have a proofreading session, whether the Nelson's blog post is appropriate for our Weekly News or not is another question. We - mostly Sascha and me - have tried to have team meetings to improve Weekly News again and again. But on most of the meetings, there usually were only Sascha and me... :-( Again: 'What we really have to fear is a lack of interest.' The more you'll participate and help editing Weekly News, the better the Weekly News will be.
* so the blog was about the marketing side of the fork. Sure. Still, it was a bit clueless - indeed, from a marketing point it's not smart to create two projects - from the Free Software dynamics pov it's the best thing that has happened to OpenOffice in years and it should've happened years ago... Marketing is clearly secondairy here. And yes, I imagine it would be fun to see the marketing battle. From a FOSS perspective - I just hope it won't take LibreOffice long to win.
Link to the blog in question: http://nmarques.digitalwhores.net/2010/10/18/openoffice-org-and-libre-office...
I have another doubt on 'OpenOffice.org vs LibreOffice' issue in openSUSE project. I myself have heard many times from one of the developers of Go-OO about the negative effect of bureaucratism OpenOffice.org project has. Therefore I want to support The Document Foundation and won't oppose to adopt LibreOffice as a default office suite for openSUSE distribution instead of Oracle's OOo - I'm already using LibreOffice now ;-). However, when and who decided that openSUSE will adopt LibreOffice instead of Oracle's OOo? Is this issue openly discussed somewhere and I missed it? On 15. October, Petr Mladek announced 'We are going to switch from the OpenOffice.org to the LibreOffice code base on openSUSE.' http://lizards.opensuse.org/2010/10/15/libreoffice-3_2_99_2/ Although the feature request '#310686: Include LibreOffice Productivity Suite' was posted to openFATE on 8 October, https://features.opensuse.org/310686 I don't think there have been enough discussions on this feature. Jos wrote:
(...) the LibreOffice efforts (part of openSUSE!) (...)
but as you can read the comment on Petr's announcement, there certainly are contributors of original OOo in openSUSE community! As I mentioned above, I myself want to support TDF and LibreOffice, but as one of the editors of Weekly News, I want to be as neutral as possible. ;-) Best, -- _/_/ Satoru Matsumoto - openSUSE Member - Japan _/_/ _/_/ Marketing/Weekly News/openFATE Screening Team _/_/ _/_/ mail: helios_reds_at_gmx.net / irc: HeliosReds _/_/ _/_/ http://blog.zaq.ne.jp/opensuse/ _/_/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help@opensuse.org