| Current mood: |  sad |
A letter to the editor of Linux For You
I wrote the mail below to the editor on the 8th. Have not received a response till date so I guess it does not matter much to them.
Dear Editor,
Please try and get the magazine to get its act together. The consistency
of quality of the magazine moves through a sine curve with un-erring
frequency, articles are printed giving a distinct impression that they
are half-done and half researched and most importantly the jarring use
of colors seem to bother the reader more than earlier.
I would urge you to take a look at Mango Parfait's column on Linux
question and answers in The TUX Magazine and then honestly assess the
responses and the quality of them published under the name of Vipin
Sharma. In simple words, the latter leaves too much to be desired. Half
hearted responses and vague discussions under the name of Q&A don't
provide too much interest to the reader.
Providing news to the avid readers of news in the magazine should form
one of the aims. Sometime back I had suggested that summarising Linux
Kernel Mailing List traffic (lkml) and publishing them might be a nice
way to introduce younger and fresher faces to the world of FOSS. I see
that you don't see much reason in doing that - could I ask why ? Since
the monthly digest is anyway available, all it would require is for
someone to read through it and summarise the important points.
Additionally, you might like to create a spot for O'Reilly's monthly
book updates - they are fairly regular these days and some nice books
are out there in the O'Reilly catalog.
The regular columns need to get a life. They are going
round-and-round-the-bush talking about the same things over and over
again without showing much innovation in ideas, opinions or insights.
The feature articles need to have some research into them. For example,
the ones of GNOME and KDE (in the current issue) while providing details
about the legacy and history does little to provide a roadmap for the
future and the GNOME/KDE goals or even tie it in with Portland Project
(which is happening in a large way). Additionally getting folks who have
hands-on knowledge and experience to write eg getting someone who *has*
SELinux deployments to write on it rather than getting someone to cull
information from websites and books to compile and collate an article.
In case studies of deployments (especially strategic ones) do please try
and highlight the challenges and the solutions as this is what
influences others to become adopters. If you look at the Bombay High
Court story this month it falls short on those grounds. Additionally,
inputs from the SIs, Hardware Vendors would make the story complete.
Getting bits of the magazine online would be a great way to get bloggers
to provide links. These online bits can be source code snippets which
takes up space in the article content to LUG details and some special
features from the magazine. This would also require you to update the
LUG database (it is old in large bits)
Regards
Sankarshan
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sankarshan) wrote,
