Re: Centralized Linux announcements/news list?

[Dave Whitinger <dave@whitinger.net>]

Roger,

Myself and Zach Beane (of GIMP News fame) had talked about doing this
last summer.

The problem is, most people are not currently interested in having a
centralized location for news.

I ended up opening Three Point's Linux News Wire, converting my site from
a web-based news site, to a moderated mailing list news site.

The result has been positive - I've been able to get news out immediately,
via E-Mail, and the other sites can pick this information up and update
their own pages.

I would love to see Linux News centralized.  It's really just a matter of
figuring out who is going to be the carrier.

Dave

On Tue, 28 Jul 1998, Roger Dingledine wrote:

> The Simple End-User Linux (SEUL) Project has been working recently
> on trying to convince commercial educational software companies to
> port their programs to Linux (for commercial sale or gpl'd). The
> following post sums it up pretty well: (Doug's been doing all the
> work so far)
> 
> Doug Loss (dloss@csrlink.net) wrote to the seul-dev-apps list:
> >I've been contacting educational software manufacturers and
> >entreating/urging/requesting that they make Linux versions of their
> >programs.  I've presented some arguments as to why this might be an
> >easy, relatively inexpensive addition to their product line and why it
> >might be a good thing for them to do.
> >
> >Evidently I reached someone interested in some of the companies I
> >contacted, because I got 4 responses asking for more information.  Out
> >of ~40 companies cold-contacted that's a pretty good return.  One of the
> >standard questions they asked was (generically), "We're a small company,
> >and the educational software market isn't an extremely profitable one.
> >How could we make the Linux community aware of our products if we did
> >make them available on Linux?"
> >
> >This seems like a very valid question, not only for the educational
> >software manufacturers but for _any_ mid-level software company that is
> >interested in supporting Linux.  Off the top of my head I advised them
> >to post a message about the availability of their products to slashdot,
> >to freshmeat, and to Linux Weekly News, as well as posting such a
> >message to comp.os.linux.announce.  I've no doubt that I've missed some
> >good venues for getting the word out to the Linux community; I'd welcome
> >some discussion on this topic.  I'd also like to use whatever
> >information comes out of such a discussion in the HOWTO I'm going
> >to be working on dealing with advocating Linux ports of commercial
> >products.  I won't be able to do serious work on that till the end of
> >August, so there's time for some thought and discussion that ought to
> >help keep me from screwing things up too much.  Thanks for your
> >comments.
> 
> Currently when you want to announce some new Linux news, you go to a
> half dozen or dozen sites, and you perform the "submit news" ritual at
> each one of these sites. This is a daunting task for a company new to
> the Linux community. 
> 
> Indeed, even for people comfortable with our way of distributing
> information, we still have the problems that it takes extra time at each
> site, and most people doing announces are bound to miss some or even
> most of the sites they ought to have gotten to. 
> 
> I noticed that lwn and freshmeat combined part of their apps-reporting
> sections recently to cut down on duplicated work. Are there more plans
> of this in the future? I recognize that each site has unique features
> that distinguish it from the other information sites in the Linux
> community, but there are definitely still overlaps in work and function.
> 
> Have the major news sources considered creating a more centralized
> location for each of the types of news? (Eg press releases, non-published
> advocacy materials, security announcements, opensource application
> announcements, commercial application announcements, popular interest
> announcements and discussion (a la slashdot), etc.) I noticed that the
> Linux News Agency (http://www.cdm.com.mx/newswire/LinuxNews.html) looks
> like it's a start, but I'd never heard of it before I started hunting
> today, I have no idea if it's being maintained or if it works, and in
> fact it looks like I need to download a helper application to read their
> news, which is completely unacceptable.
> 
> Alternatively, should a list like http://www.linux.org/help/reference.html
> or http://www.linux-center.org/en/informations/news/index.html be made
> but that is more explicitly a list of places to go to make Linux
> announcements, carefully explaining which announcements should go where,
> and kept very thoroughly up to date? (And then the out-of-date ones can
> stop misleading people into thinking they're the official lists.) The Linux
> PR Project (http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~conradp/linux/pr/) looks like a
> good start at this, and might even turn into a centralized repository
> if people put some effort into it.
> 
> I know that Linux United has been working on a vendor database to track
> the progress of porting various applications to Linux, but it isn't
> moving very quickly yet. Either SEUL or Linux United would be willing to
> host a growing database of educational software companies, as well as an
> educational-software-news archive and mailing lists for the Linux community,
> to help make the path to the new platform easier for new companies.
> 
> Please give this some thought; Linux is rapidly gaining momentum, but one
> of its major stumbling blocks is still attracting companies to port over
> to Linux, and convincing them it's worthwhile.
> 
> Thanks,
> --Roger (SEUL Sysarch, http://www.seul.org/)
> 
> (Please feel free to forward this to organizations or companies that I've
> managed to miss. The more I started looking, the more I found...(But it
> would still be nice if you cc'ed to me, so I know how widely it's getting
> distributed.))
>