Editorial
Editorial by Greg Lehey
 |
Greg Lehey |
Welcome to the first electronic edition of AUUGN!
As you can see, this issue has turned out differently from the way we had expected. There are a number of reasons for that:
- Although a number of people bemoaned the passing of the print edition, and though we asked for expressions of interest to get a print edition anyway, we received no feedback whatsoever.
- It's clear that we'll need an HTML edition at some point.
- A lot of the text we get is in HTML; reformatting takes time.
- An HTML edition is simply easier, since we don't need to modify the format to conform with a print edition.
So for this edition I've decided to put the main structure in HTML and use PDF for some of the other articles. If you don't like the format, please let me know.
Looking through the edition, you'll notice big differences: our loss of copy is continuing, and I have had almost no response whatsoever to my requests even from the diehard submitters. If this continues, we might as well close up shop. Does anyone care? If you care, please tell me. It may decide whether we continue to publish AUUGN.
On the other hand, there's plenty of stuff here. The change of format means that we can include the complete John Lions' commentary on the Sixth Edition UNIX Operating System as published on USENET 11 years ago. We also have all of last year's AUUGNs in PDF format. And of course there's always the software. The choice of DVD as a medium means that we no longer have the space problems that have plagued our CD distributions in the past.
The other thing you'll note is that this AUUGN is three months late. It might be more appropriate to say that the first edition of the year simply didn't appear. On the other hand, there's more than double the content here.
Finally, I'd like to recall what I said in the July 2004 edition:
So who's the new editor? We don't have one. I'm doing this issue, but I don't intend to become the editor. Like Con, I've recently come to the conclusion that I don't have enough time for all the things I do. If you don't already know, you'll see in a couple of pages that I have resigned from the position of AUUG president, and I have also resigned from the FreeBSD Core team. These are consequences of this realization. Given the current pace of the industry and the lack of time available for volunteer activities, there's a good chance that nobody will have enough time to volunteer.
Unfortunately, I haven't had enough support in this role, so regretfully I am resigning from the editorial team. That leaves only Frank. Please give him your full support: the best support would be to join the team and help him.