Linuxcare has decided to
hire me to keep writing Kernel Traffic and help coordinate an
expansion of the KT idea into other projects. Right now there is
only Kernel
Cousin debian-hurd, but Linuxcare plans to cover important
projects like KDE, Gnome, and Apache; and with help there may soon
be many more.
From the Kernel Cousins
home page:
“Kernel Cousins is an attempt to extend the Kernel Traffic idea
to other Open Source projects. As an Open Source project itself,
the potential actually exists for Kernel Cousins to summarize the
entire Open Source development world. Unless you’re willing to
settle for version numbers, feature lists, and security alerts,
it’s very difficult to follow more than a few projects,
particularly those with high traffic mailing lists. Kernel Cousins,
at least in theory, could allow a reader to follow dozens of
projects in quite a bit of detail, with minimal time
commitment.
In addition to the obvious benefit of keeping up on the details
of various projects, Kernel Cousins could help the projects
themselves. Potential developers could ease their way in, without
having to make the comittment of subscribing to the mailing list;
they could also leave for awhile without losing track of what was
going on. Non-developers who would normally consume server
resources by subscribing to a given list, could follow the KC
instead, giving the developers faster turnaround time, i.e. better
communication.
No single organization could conceivably hope to write a KC for
all the lists out there; but the bazaar could do it. If a single
person from each list wrote a Kernel Cousin for that list, the
whole thing would be done, just like that. Like Kernel Traffic,
Kernel Cousins is distributed under the GPL. As a searchable
database of features, bugs, debates, personalities, and everything
else, however big it gets, it will all belong to you.”