This mailing list, its charter and purpose.

[Jordan Hubbard]

As the FreeBSD handbook states in Internet Resources section:

"This is the mailing list for people interested only in occasional
announcements of significant FreeBSD events. This includes
announcements about snapshots and other releases. It contains
announcements of new FreeBSD capabilities. It may contain calls for
volunteers etc. This is a low volume, strictly moderated mailing
list."

This, of course, leaves the question of just what constitutes a
"significant FreeBSD event" somewhat poorly defined.  This message is
an attempt to clarify that somewhat.

The FreeBSD-announce subscription list currently has some 22,000
entries in it, a large number of which are mailing lists which contain
even more users of their own.  Suffice it to say that a very
conservative estimate would put the total readership of this list well
above 50,000 individuals scattered across many different countries.

This means that whatever gets posted to it has to have some *global*
relevance or a large percentage of these 50,000+ people will not
benefit from your posting at all.  At various times in the past,
certain material such as announcements for local user group meetings
has also been posted to this list, resulting in a situation where
shivering people up beyond the Arctic circle see messages like "The
Gresham Oregon FreeBSD User's Group (GOFUG) will be meeting at the
Fosters Freeze tonite at 8:00, everyone please be sure to bring one
goat and a CD in order that ..."  It's just not widely relevant to
FreeBSD or the "average" FreeBSD user as a whole and it's something
which will be strongly discouraged from now on.

This should not be taken as a rebuke to those -announce users who were
never quite clear on this before and may now feel accused of having
done something evil and wicked.  As I said above, the charter has
always left this ill-defined and so freebsd-announce, which never sees
a lot of traffic anyway, simply got used for such purposes.

A good example of an "appropriate" use of freebsd-announce would be to
shout about a truly announce-worthy new feature, service or product
which applies to FreeBSD users world-wide.  If someone were to port
FreeBSD to the IBM 3090, for example, that would certainly be a rather
announce-worthy event.  If a major ISV like Oracle were to suddenly
offer FreeBSD-native versions of their commercial products on the open
market, that would be another.  The availability of each major release
of FreeBSD, for that matter, falls into that category.  I think you
all get the idea.

With apologies to all for any previous misunderstandings on this
topic,

- Jordan

----- End forwarded message -----

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