Debian Community News is proud to be independent

If you monitor the Twitter feed of Donald Trump, you will get a lot of information about how he runs the USA but can you trust it? A range of independent news outlets in Washington and the rest of the world provide a more diverse range of opinions. It's called Freedom of the Press. If you believe in Software Freedom and the Debian Free Software Guidelines, we hope you will understand the importance of a Free Press goes hand-in-hand with that.

Debian and other free software organizations have official blogs. If you are giving your time and money to these organizations, or if you are trusting the Debian OS to run your mission critical infrastructure, do you need a more comprehensive view of the free software landscape?

Debian Community News hopes to fill that gap.

Next time the leaders of Debian try an unethical experiment on a volunteer, such as the 2018 Christmas demotions/lynchings, we hope to catch them. We hope that leaders will perform better knowing that they are being watched. That can only make Debian better for everybody, including volunteers and users.

Debian Community News has never pretended to be an official mouthpiece of the Debian Project Leader (DPL). Our About page makes that clear. We would have no reason to exist if we were under the control of the DPL.

Trademarks™

Debian Community News covers topics exclusively related to Debian™. Our name and our domain name are a fair use of the Debian trademark to indicate the nature of the topics we write about.

Linux Weekly News (LWN) operates on the same basis, using the name Linux, even though they are independent from Linus Torvalds and the Linux Foundation. They've been doing that for 20 years and Debian Community News hopes to be here in another 20 years too.

Ethical standards in journalism

LWN has recently run an article attacking a long standing volunteer who resigned from his post at a time of grief. They didn't make any effort whatsoever to contact the volunteer for comment before running their article. This violation of his family's privacy and failure to seek all sides of the story are a serious violation of the ethical standards of journalism. LWN feels that cutting and pasting troll messages and fake news to make articles is good business. We can't help wondering why their subscribers have to pay for fake news when there are far more amusing sources of fake news that we can all access free of charge.

WARNING: we use parody

Many aspects of Debian Community News involve parody. With many other groups setting up teams of one person in Debian, we use the Royal We™ extensively. Misquoting people has become a deliberate tactic used in mailing list discussions and we apologize if we ever use somebody's quote out of context. Former DPL Chris Lamb pioneered the practice of putting people's names in the subject lines of messages to humiliate them and so we will never hesitate to use a real name when it is an important part of a story.

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