Hi Holmes. It seems that
you're thinking in terms of sending a letter to the editor and a note
to the author. I'd like to propose a different approach entirely.
I just had an experience where a publication published erroneous
statements on another issue. I called the publication's
editor-in-chief and had a very cordial conversation with him. I made a
point of being polite and respectful while explaining to him just what
was wrong with what they'd published. After talking for a while, I
asked if they might be willing to allow me to write an article
explaining my position, and he agreed to accept an op-ed from me.
In my opinion, simply sending a letter to the editor is aiming too
low. That should be a fallback position. If an appropriate
representative from the FSF were to call Cnet News' editor, you might
be able to get the message out in a much more prominent fashion, and
thereby get the message noticed by a much larger percentage of readers.
In any case, I definitely agree that a polite note should be sent to
the author, clearly stating that the intention is not to attack him but
simply to clear up a misunderstanding on his part so that he'll be
better equipped to give his readers good information in the future.
Mark Rosenthal
Holmes Wilson wrote:
Hey
everyone,
Here's a good example of something we'd like this list to respond to.
People often send FSF emails pointing to blog posts that require some
kind of response from the free software community.
This is a particularly good example, because it's not even the case
that somebody's especially antagonistic to the ideas of free software--
they're just kinda lost ;)
Have a look this article and propose a response to the list. I think
in this case it would be good to draft both a comment and a short note
to the author to his own email address or through a contact form (can
somebody get this?).
Try to keep it clear, concise, and polite. No cruft! Let's discuss
the best response here first before sending it through... we'd like to
do things this way while we're getting started.
Also, some pretty heavy discussion kicked up over the weekend and we've
had some unsubscribe requests. I think that's natural since this will
be a very active list (and people will obviously have their own
questions and ideas about how best to explain free software, for
example) but we should be careful to keep things productive. This will
be a lot easier when we have more work to do :)
So let's focus on this dry run and see how it goes.
-Holmes
> *CNet blog Network* writer Dennis O'Reilly makes several erroneous
> statements in his 20 Oct 2009
> article<http://news.cnet.com/8301-13880_3-10378605-68.html>
titled
> 'Finding the Catch in Free Software'. Most glaring among his
mis-statements
> is:
>> The GNU GPL stipulates that the software can be used, copied,
and
>> distributed verbatim without limitation, though it cannot be
changed.
>
> The guy claims to have been writing about tech since 1985,&
will
> presumably continue writing for some time. Would FSF be interested
in
> undertaking an effort to improve O'Reilly's understanding of
FLOSS?
>
|