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Heise Breaks Promise: Takes 'H Online' Offline, Essentially Deleting Thousands of High-Quality FOSS Articles

Heise Verlag



Summary: Heinz Heise, a publisher based in Hannover (Germany), puts an end to English-speaking coverage of FOSS and then buries all the articles

ONE OF THE BEST resources of GNU/Linux and FOSS news ceased publication of further/new material last year. Its editor, however, said that the articles would continue to be made available. Wikipedia and many other important sites link to those articles. There is also coverage of misconduct by Microsoft, so it's not FOSS-exclusive.



"There is also coverage of misconduct by Microsoft, so it's not FOSS-exclusive."Well, there has been some bad news for a couple of days now. We tried to find an explanation for it and we have spoken to some former writers of the site, hoping to get in touch with the management (same thing we did with QuinStreet to help restore the excellent resource Linux Devices). There's no success so far.

We need to take action now. Please pressure Heise (maybe by petitioning) to restore the site or hand over copyrights (or permission for use) of articles back to writers so that they can resurrect the information themselves, at their own expense. What Heise has done here is vile deletionism, a form of revisionism. According to Wikipedia, "In July 2006, Heise Security was launched in the UK.[2] It mostly featured translated news from the German site, but also featured locally relevant stories. The UK version of Heise Online came in February 2008. In February 2009, the UK site was renamed to The H, and located at h-online.com.[3] In July 2013, The H was closed down because it proved difficult to monetize traffic to the website.[4]"

The promise that this site would continue to stand was not kept.

Let's say that the site did not make money. Is that a good enough reason to burn the books (no longer hosting the site/pages)? We need to fight to bring back online the articles. A group of people put many thousands of days of their lives to produce the stories -- the stories which benefit all.

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