Calling me "mister" was never required (and makes me feel old). Working for start-ups (or start-ups within large companies as was the case with ARRIS gave me the opportunity to constantly teach people my job and then create a new one for myself. I don't have the personality to repeatedly do anything so this was pretty ideal. How are you doing (I haven't logged into LinkedIn for a while)? Still out hiking the beautiful NorthWest?
If you have a big hard drive sitting around somewhere, please save these! I'll see if I can't get them uploaded to IPFS myself eventually. (edit: Got too excited, should probably wait and see what they're planning to do w/ respect to licensing)
They had/have a script that would let you download the recent edition via CLI, I don't think the panel works anymore to grab the PDFs but I used their script as a base to grab all the past issues and keep them backed up, I'm glad I did that now.
It sounds like I may have been mistaken and it is still walled off. There is an archive of issues up to 2018 here: https://secure2.linuxjournal.com/ljarchive/LJArchive2018.zip -- I know this works for sure since I downloaded it from a server of mine a few hours ago. Since the main issue download page is still restricted to members it seems, I'll hold off on sharing my mirrored copy of all the previous issues just so I'm not being a dick.
I was able to check it without login, maybe it was cached. I was able to grab this archive up to 2018 from a definitely unauthenticated host a few hours ago so I know this will work: https://secure2.linuxjournal.com/ljarchive/LJArchive2018.zip
I see others have posted them already so I'll get them public shortly and share a link.
Link: http://ljarchive.neverlocate.me -- includes my hacky mirror script I used to get the PDFs, the HTML archive (being mirrored now, will move to web root when done) and the LJ 2018 archive zip
Kyle! I'm so sorry to hear this. It's a long shot, but I'm interested to see if we have the resources now to give this another life. I FB'd you about it, which is I think now a dumb way to reach you.
It might not be financially possible, but if it were, I'm curious what the community reaction would be.
Essentially, as a fan of LJ, would you pay a $5 subscription to Medium to see Linux Journal continue there with maybe (I'm estimating w/o knowing traffic numbers) 15 new articles per month?
LJ's editor, Kyle, and I both lived north of San Francisco when he was writing for O'Reilly and I was working there. And that's what I pitched him: the basic Medium offer is very O'Reilly-like, at least compared to the general web. There's a simple trade-off. Publish behind a metered paywall (very un-GPL, but O'Reilly books are their own kind of paywall), and in exchange get money to invest in the quality of the articles.
I'm kind of iffy on the details beyond that. I helped start a programming publication on Medium recently and I don't know if the right thing to do would be to have LJ be separate or be inside that publication. But I do know that I see a lot of Linux publishing where the articles seem light. I think money to the author (or maybe it's money to an editor) would help that.
But obviously, there's the flip side which is that culturally there's a bias that information be free. :shrug: I just want information to be accurate! And given the number of Linux pubs, I think at least one of them has got to be in a situation where both the quality and the check book would be improved inside Medium.
Did they try to ask for donation? Linux Journal has a huge reader base most of who probably grew up in the 90s and early 2000s. Most of these readers are now probably working professionals and earning well enough to donate a small amount to Linux Journal on a monthly or yearly basis to keep this journal running.
Online payment system is typical platform business where network effect dominates.
There are multiple competitors for Patreon, but they can't get off the ground because they don't have the users because they don't have the creators because they don't have the users.... You can build much better platform and it's just crickets in the sales because operating costs on smaller userbase are higher. Small competitor might force Patreon to reduce prices a little until they can kill the competition, but it's hard to have stable competitors.
Businesses that already have massive number of customer subscriptions and brand recognition could enter the market.
What I said, rephrased for clarity: It used to be 5% for all features. That's what the 8% plan is now. The new and current 5% plan is the stripped down version.
What you said, by my understanding: the 8% plan contains what used to be the only option [standard, by my phrasing] at 5%.
I don't see any disagreement unless you were referring to the discounts given to existing creators. I'm talking about the new creator rates.
Patreon has three membership plans for creators, none of which are actually 10%. :) The basic one is 5%, the "pro" one is 8%, and the "premium" one is 12%, which is targeted more at companies/teams than individuals. (It comes with a dedicated account manager and I believe some kind of shipping/fulfillment system for physical merchandise.) Their payment processing fees are also actually lower than what you'd pay Stripe directly for pledges of $3 and under.
Patreon isn't problem-free, but I think they get dinged a little too hard by folks sometimes. It's not very easy to find a competitor that offers comparable value-added services at significantly lower cost.
One example would be DarkCookie with "SummerTime saga", a "dating sim" at around $50,000 US.
Or another example at 769 patrons and $2,287 per month: "Porn Empire is a simulation/management with light RPG elements where you play as an amateur porn producer.
Start small, shoot amateur porn and as you progress, you earn more money, buy better equipment, pick up better girls and train them"
If people really cared they would have signed up. But the proof is in the pudding. What people really care about is totally different from what they say publicly. What they really care about, apparently, if you follow the money, is interactive cartoon porn.
I wonder if Patreon would consider diverting a small amount of the porn money to worthy causes like Linux Journal.
I'm not sure that nobody wants to pay. There are too many things to pay for. Suppose 50% of the sources of HN are paywalled with a monthly subscription. How many of them one person could be paying for? Not many I guess. With a per post subscription? More but we're not really there. Furthermore it's hard to ask for money before the customer sees the product. How many disappointments before the pay per article model fails?
The search engine and aggregator sites commoditized information, including technical one. That started killing news, online and paper.
I beg to differ. There's just more competition, and the bar for entering is lower. And so you get a lot of chaff. But there are serious journalists with high standards and integrity out there that thrive on the donation model, such as Timcast. Now there's a guy who actually meets up where it happens! Add to this that often it's not needed to send someone out, because you can always read some random guy's twitter. We don't exactly have less access to news or reporting. The problem is the filtering. But I'm not sad for it. Not one bit! Because it has revealed to us just how things were filtered in the past by the big giants. Not so anymore.
Other than that, you have to remember that there's been a pretty painful phase of adaptation with new and emergent technology. This means a lot of the old bastions have fallen, or are trying to figure out how to cope with the new media reality. Either way tabloids will always sell more than real news, sadly. They also did during the heyday of serious broadsheets, and there's not really any indication that it's going to change in the near future. There are some noble efforts to fight the fake news agenda, that tries to pick apart the rabble of the tabloids, such as Snopes -- until you realise that they're also extremely biased. So in the end, you're left with thinking for yourself, which can be both a blessing and a curse. Probably more of the latter if you believe in UFO's and crystal healing...
I support Timcast because of how refreshing and real his journalism is. I actually had him in mind as an example of a real journalist when I posted the above comment. But it's still going to be an upwards battle, there's a few good ones like Tim, but not nearly enough to replace what we used to call the journalism industry, most of which has turned to mush in past decades.
I am afraid it was mush long before I was born even. That internet platforms could beat it isn't a praise of the platforms but an utter indictment of their quality - if they had it they could survive regardless of medium.
I have a hunch that internet platforms are making the media show it's true colours by revealing how shoddy it is in comparison. The amount of constant smear attacks against new media personalities and big tech to mind. Not that I dislike criticism of big tech, but notice how it wasn't a problem for them until YouTubers (political or not) really started affecting their bottom line as less people go to the news for "entertainment".
Also, say what you want about PewDiePie, but he was able to go toe-to-toe with The Wall Street Journal and win (at least in terms of views and reputation). This just shows how much they've lost control.
I think FOSS has not sufficiently explored the donation model. I'd be keen to donate a decent amount of cash to get some fundamental improvements to Emacs, for example. Lots of developers are relatively well paid and use a lot of free tools.
I was a subscriber for 15 years. When they went digital it lost a lot of value for me. However when my subscription came up for renewal in June I realized I had not even read an issue in a few months.
Bless you. And this reminded me to donate to Archive again.
Please, folks, donate to Archive so we don't lose all the amazing things they've archived over the decades.
As for LJ, so sad to see them go. I was a subscriber since 2012 or so. I'm still hopeful someone buys out their assets and resurrects the journal at least in an online-only form.
Isn't there any service that allows one to subscribe to baskets of magazines by topics, and handles payment distribution to them with some mutual agreements? I think many of these online mags suffer because there are too many of them each with its own payment schedule, and people don't really like to set up dozens of subscriptions.
I had hoped Apple News+ would be a way to access and compensate all the great small niche magazines like the stuff you see in Casa Magazines in Manhattan. Instead it was the most generic stuff that's in every supermarket check out line. I know they have to appeal to a broad range of people, but you'd think Apple would appreciate all those music, art, and culture magazines. Maybe there was no easy way to include them, but for a company with that many resources they should have found a way.
I agree that Apple's News service is disappointingly pedestrian. The reason for its mediocrity illustrates the problem that original publishing has with the current market.
When these mega corporations post their yearly earnings, those earnings are the result of a focus on the lowest common denominator. The Art, Music, Culture stuff doesn't mean much aside from marketing. Any business that gets its primary funding through niche markets withers after they scale to their maximum sustainable size.
I used to be a loyal subscriber to Linux Journal and would await every issue. Then I started getting junk mail from (if memory serves me) ACM. When I pressed them about it they revealed that they'd gotten my physical address from Linux Journal.
I cancelled my subscription and never picked up another copy.
I can't help wonder how many other people got annoyed at that kind of behaviour given the cross over between Linux and Privacy.
Note: I'll still mourn it's loss because it had a huge impact on my teenage years.
How do you "press" an organization? Every time I've tried to ask someone where they got my info they either ignored it or refused to tell me. Did you have some kind of leverage over the ACM?
It's the principle more than anything. I gave LJ my address so they could deliver my magazine (that I paid for) not so they could sell it to someone else.
I'm pretty sure all magazines do that. I just buy issues I want on ebay now, after being burned by that. Cheaper than the "discount" subscriber rate, cheaper than buying backissues directly from the magazine. Ebay's probably selling all my info too but they've already got it anyway.
Most if not all Millennials are in their 30s and are often scapegoated, even though the cohort you're trying to blame are generation Z, which isn't helpful either.
I was a subscriber for about five years. Very deep dive, very Microsoft culture.
LJ was an independent magazine, I think. That is, not paid for by Linux Foundation or major distributors like IBM or Canonical. Ad and subscription support.
I suppose London Trust Media is not bankrupt, so is Linux Journal LLC free to be sold? It's sad to lose jobs etc. but at least a non-profit caretaker to host a static copy shouldn't be too hard.
Very strange. Early yesterday morning, I thought out of nowhere: "hey! around 2011 or so, our lounge in our organization used to have Linux Journal. Wonder what happened to that subscription?" So sad to see this happen. I personally would like this to continue, as I am sure many of my generation of programmers.
Let's hope lwn doesn't suffer the same fate... if there are any LJ subscribers who don't subscribe to lwn, I hope they may take out a lwn subscription.
Or today's article on the CTF debugging format. They're pretty much the only resource aimed at intermediate or advanced developers that's written to be highly technical but not academic.
Thanks for thinking of us! LWN is not making anybody rich, but we're on reasonably solid ground for now. Despite what some folks are saying, the Linux community is willing to support at least some of the things it values. Our biggest problem at the moment is finding writers who can work at the level our readers expect.
Jonathan, I'm one of your subscribers and it's worth every penny. Thank you for doing the awesome job of compressing the relevant events and changes in the Linux world into clear and concise articles and helping me navigate the complicated world of the kernel.
Well, considering the boom of streaming services across young generation, that's a free attack.
Other reformulated: People change interests. Unfortunately Apple is taking the cake of the most desirable gadgets manufacturer and of course Linux never got that traction (how many years have we read about 'This is the year of Linux Desktop'?).
The worse part is when a Big $$$ Corp uses free tools and never pays back to those who worked hard. Most of the Cloud Services are using opensource and free tools to gain billions of dollars yearly, but how much do the Linux community gets back? Maybe $25K once in a while
Free of charge foss is bluntly silly unless it’s software that saves lives or greatly progresses science. To think there are so many great devs out there, spending their own time and dime to build free of charge software which is then commercially exploited by cloud providers is just sad.
Many developers work on FOSS for free. A project with a good community often has many people who contribute the occasional bug report, patch, or documentation addition.
Few developers work on FOSS full time for free, at least for very long. However, there is a sizeable group of FOSS developers who do full time or large amounts of part time work for far less than market rate, especially those who are funded primarily through donations. You can go to many smaller projects and see the level of donations they get (e.g. the creators of Godot pay themselves $4400/month, and that is one of the most financially successful small open source projects). I would suspect even for the projects you mentioned above, money is far from the primary motivation of the developers, and they could make more elsewhere.
It's hard to profit off selling something with no per unit cost associated with copying when buyers have the legal ability to resell.
Successful FOSS businesses usually make money off of selling exceptions, (i.e. selling to non-free software companies) or creating a product with per unit cost (e.g. support).
Just because your employer pays you to write open source, which is great, it doesn't mean all FOSS is sponsored by employers. "but use evidence of that to get well-paid contract work" - yup, that's the issue. Most FOSS is written by devs who want something shiny on their CVs, but don't realise that a well paid contract is far less than what they would get if they were to sell the software. Most FOSS devs are taken advantage of. I cringe each time I see "i wrote an open source alternative to X". Why would you waste your own time building something free and knowing that someone somewhere will make money off of your work? Instead, depraving large companies of your free of charge software means greater distribution of wealth among software developers. Plus FOSS means "free" as in freedom of knowledge not free of charge.
Essentially, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and so on, have outsourced development to vast amount of unpaid developers; while software focused companies are becoming more and more rare because somewhere, somehow, a bunch of highly skilled engineers think it's a good idea to spend their own time writing something awesome, while at work they complain about how their work is not understood and how management doesn't give a dime about quality engineering. Instead they should deprive these companies of their free labour, group together and build awesome technically written code, and charge money for it.
I kind of agree in a tragedy of the commons kind of way, but you take it entirely too far.
FOSS projects that tend to be volunteer led, are that way because the developer is scratching their own itch. Maybe I could make money with one of hobbies, but its a risk, and I don't want to spoil something I enjoy so I just develop X in my spare time. I enjoy it, it's something I wouldn't normally get to do and yes as a bonus I can put it on a CV.
Expectations beyond that are unreasonable? You don't have any right to make money from that, any more than a commercial company has a right to make a profit.
And say everyone did what you suggest, its not immediately clear the world would be a better place anyway, maybe google and Facebook only exist because of the existence of Open source....
>To think there are so many great devs out there, spending their own time and dime to build free of charge software which is then commercially exploited by cloud providers is just sad.
The obvious solution to this is to use the AGPLv3 license for all or most software one writes, which is what I prefer to do, as it's the strongest copyleft license available currently.
We see in many circles that it's not the hip thing to do, to write copyleft software. No, the hip thing to do is write permissively-licensed software and either not care about companies using it as free labor or complaining about a ''social contract'' that wants to be implied, but never explicitly stated as copyleft does.
I believe the trend towards permissive licensing has been pushed mostly by corporate interests and now we see the result. I believe things would be better if every company had to either share its code as copyleft, write everything itself, or actually pay for other proprietary software it could incorporate into its own. That is, I'd rather Grammarly, as an example, have no real option but to purchase an Allegro or Lispworks license, rather than being able to use SBCL and contribute little or nothing.
I think the 2 biggest contributions many big corporations bring are that they do participate in maintaining the software (some at least) and that they use it. Imagine where would Linux and a lot of FOSS would be if those companies weren't pushing it around to users, making it ubiquitous.
I know it's a cynical view but it's exactly the principle of an app store: 1) one company puts in all the effort to develop a great product that would otherwise go nowhere unless 2) another company gives it the necessary reach without otherwise contributing too much.
Are you personally a part of the linux community? I mean: Do you maintain some free tool, or are you essentially like those big corps who use free tools and never pay pack?
This is a tough question, at least for me. I do maintain a number of pieces of Free software, and have contributed (sometimes significantly) to a number of applications with wide(ish) use.
I once got a kind note once from someone working in the film industry who told me my mtf/bkf tool saved their renders after a particularly nasty blunder involving their cluster and backup servers. I'm sure this probably saved them a quarter-million dollars or more, but none of that savings made it my way.
And outside of that one email, over the last nearly thirty years I've received nothing else but abuse and nit. Forks, sure. Patches, a few. But the overwhelming attitude of the open source community is that I work for free, or fuck you.
Well, fuck you guys right back!
HN isn't unique in believing there's some kind of virtue if you can get one over on your fellow man and make a buck on his or her back. Everyone seems to be like that. And if someone complains about it, it turns personal quick, often attacking the economics as you have: Have I contributed more than I've taken? Has anyone? General criticisms of whataboutism and entitlement notwithstanding, this slippery slope doesn't go anywhere good, and despite how well-meaning your question might have been, the reality is it's never enough. Nobody does anything anymore who hasn't stood on the backs of someone else.
This sucks. It sucks bad that Facebook and Google got me to work for free. And to sell ads, no less. How ashamed am I of that?
You emphasise free with an upper-case F. What does that emphasis really mean? I don't mean "well, gnu", I mean what is the deepest meaning of that emphasis?
Do you, for example, think it's good or bad if others have the freedom to use your software to do things you heartily dislike? Or if users you heartily dislike have the freedom to use your software?
Dislike? I mean, I don't like strawberries, but I wouldn't think of prohibiting anyone from enjoying them. Why should I care?
But, no, I don't believe other people should have the Freedom to do things I think are Wrong. I don't think anyone believes that.
What exactly do you want to argue? Nobody is saying Google or Facebook is violating the letter of the law (here), but they are certainly abusing our goodwill. Shame on us for not setting the terms finely enough? Or shame on them for being dicks?
This is why I've had to step away from developing free software. The amount of negativity directed my way (profane rants, useless bug reports, spam, requests to use my software under a different license for free, straight up copyright violators) made it so working on free software was a net negative.
I thank my lucky stars that younger me was smart enough to not associate my name with these projects because that would have only made the situation worse. I was able to make a clean break from the projects I was working on after tying up loose ends.
I'm part of one of those big companies that also maintains free tools and contributes back to the community because we have a vested interest in doing so.
I would value our contributions back to the community at around $500k annually, based on the comp we dump into the teams working on those tools.
Whether the shift of maintainership from unaffiliated individuals to corps is acceptable, beneficial, or harmful, is an open question.
Open and perhaps interesting, but the question I had in mind was: Are big corporations actually different from the rest of the open source users?
I guess your employer uses a lot more open source than the tools you spend $500k/y on. So your employer contributes to some development and uses lots more. That's not qualitatively different from what I personally do.
My response to that question is going to be pretty bad:
maybe. corps have interests in building tools that help them with their businesses. individuals, i think, have interest in building cool shit. there was an article a while ago exploring the difference between the 'spirit' of oss in the 90s/00s compared to now, but that's hard to qualify.
when i think of individual oss projects, my brain automatically goes to the old enlightenment window manager, and e12/e13 in particular. it was cool and not very useful compared to fvwm or afterstep, but i think the libraries rasterman worked on in the process wound up being useful elsewhere.
but it's been a long time and i'm recovering from a migraine, so you know.. don't quote me.
I try to donate $5 and $10 here and there as best I can. Looking back at paypal receipts I think I spend about $400 a year. It's not great, but it's probably more than most.
Donating a bit of money can really help motivate some folks who would otherwise lose interest. You can also donate your time and create a few pull requests to help out.
you seems to be a bit confused with references to apple and linux on desktop. this is a publication about linux, not linux. linux has "traction" in all domains in computing from supercomputers to iot to classrooms, publications of many kinds are losing "traction".
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 346 ms ] threadIf you have a big hard drive sitting around somewhere, please save these! I'll see if I can't get them uploaded to IPFS myself eventually. (edit: Got too excited, should probably wait and see what they're planning to do w/ respect to licensing)
There's also a ZIP with issues 1-293 (March 1994 to December 2018): https://secure2.linuxjournal.com/ljarchive/LJArchive2018.zip (805 MB)
* edit 1: a better link would be https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/linux-journal-ceases-pu..., directly to the article.
* edit 2: also, lots more comments from staff and readers on Kyle's twitter feed, at https://twitter.com/kylerankin
Edit: I spoke too soon, looks like they opened the page up for anyone to grab them now. Check it: https://secure2.linuxjournal.com/pdf/dljdownload.php
Link: http://ljarchive.neverlocate.me -- includes my hacky mirror script I used to get the PDFs, the HTML archive (being mirrored now, will move to web root when done) and the LJ 2018 archive zip
And archive of magazines - https://files.linuxjournal.rocks/
Essentially, as a fan of LJ, would you pay a $5 subscription to Medium to see Linux Journal continue there with maybe (I'm estimating w/o knowing traffic numbers) 15 new articles per month?
LJ's editor, Kyle, and I both lived north of San Francisco when he was writing for O'Reilly and I was working there. And that's what I pitched him: the basic Medium offer is very O'Reilly-like, at least compared to the general web. There's a simple trade-off. Publish behind a metered paywall (very un-GPL, but O'Reilly books are their own kind of paywall), and in exchange get money to invest in the quality of the articles.
I'm kind of iffy on the details beyond that. I helped start a programming publication on Medium recently and I don't know if the right thing to do would be to have LJ be separate or be inside that publication. But I do know that I see a lot of Linux publishing where the articles seem light. I think money to the author (or maybe it's money to an editor) would help that.
But obviously, there's the flip side which is that culturally there's a bias that information be free. :shrug: I just want information to be accurate! And given the number of Linux pubs, I think at least one of them has got to be in a situation where both the quality and the check book would be improved inside Medium.
There are multiple competitors for Patreon, but they can't get off the ground because they don't have the users because they don't have the creators because they don't have the users.... You can build much better platform and it's just crickets in the sales because operating costs on smaller userbase are higher. Small competitor might force Patreon to reduce prices a little until they can kill the competition, but it's hard to have stable competitors.
Businesses that already have massive number of customer subscriptions and brand recognition could enter the market.
https://www.patreon.com/product/pricing
The current 8% plan used to be 5%. Their current 5% plan is stripped down.
What I said, rephrased for clarity: It used to be 5% for all features. That's what the 8% plan is now. The new and current 5% plan is the stripped down version.
What you said, by my understanding: the 8% plan contains what used to be the only option [standard, by my phrasing] at 5%.
I don't see any disagreement unless you were referring to the discounts given to existing creators. I'm talking about the new creator rates.
Patreon isn't problem-free, but I think they get dinged a little too hard by folks sometimes. It's not very easy to find a competitor that offers comparable value-added services at significantly lower cost.
Compare that to, for example, the top 200 "adult" (porn) projects on Patreon: https://graphtreon.com/patreon-creators/adult-games
One example would be DarkCookie with "SummerTime saga", a "dating sim" at around $50,000 US.
Or another example at 769 patrons and $2,287 per month: "Porn Empire is a simulation/management with light RPG elements where you play as an amateur porn producer. Start small, shoot amateur porn and as you progress, you earn more money, buy better equipment, pick up better girls and train them"
If people really cared they would have signed up. But the proof is in the pudding. What people really care about is totally different from what they say publicly. What they really care about, apparently, if you follow the money, is interactive cartoon porn.
I wonder if Patreon would consider diverting a small amount of the porn money to worthy causes like Linux Journal.
But, according to the link you sent, the global top 100 only has 15 NSFW creators. People seem way more interested in Podcasts and YouTube videos.
- podcasts
- YouTube
- porn
- Skyrim mods
- Minecraft mods
- Instagram models
... several other bullet points ....
- journalism
The search engine and aggregator sites commoditized information, including technical one. That started killing news, online and paper.
Other than that, you have to remember that there's been a pretty painful phase of adaptation with new and emergent technology. This means a lot of the old bastions have fallen, or are trying to figure out how to cope with the new media reality. Either way tabloids will always sell more than real news, sadly. They also did during the heyday of serious broadsheets, and there's not really any indication that it's going to change in the near future. There are some noble efforts to fight the fake news agenda, that tries to pick apart the rabble of the tabloids, such as Snopes -- until you realise that they're also extremely biased. So in the end, you're left with thinking for yourself, which can be both a blessing and a curse. Probably more of the latter if you believe in UFO's and crystal healing...
Also, say what you want about PewDiePie, but he was able to go toe-to-toe with The Wall Street Journal and win (at least in terms of views and reputation). This just shows how much they've lost control.
Hell no. Patreon have already shown they want to be part of the culture war, we don't need to give them any more excuses.
If I want to spend my money on virtual lolis, I expect all of that money (besides the patreon fee) to go to virtual lolis.
Please, folks, donate to Archive so we don't lose all the amazing things they've archived over the decades.
As for LJ, so sad to see them go. I was a subscriber since 2012 or so. I'm still hopeful someone buys out their assets and resurrects the journal at least in an online-only form.
[1] https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/linux-journal-ceases-pu...
I cancelled my subscription and never picked up another copy.
I can't help wonder how many other people got annoyed at that kind of behaviour given the cross over between Linux and Privacy.
Note: I'll still mourn it's loss because it had a huge impact on my teenage years.
Completely random but interesting.
I was a subscriber for about five years. Very deep dive, very Microsoft culture.
LJ was an independent magazine, I think. That is, not paid for by Linux Foundation or major distributors like IBM or Canonical. Ad and subscription support.
... again.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15826220
Or today's article on the CTF debugging format. They're pretty much the only resource aimed at intermediate or advanced developers that's written to be highly technical but not academic.
Sorry, just had a mini heart attack when I opened that and don’t want others to do the same
Not only do you get benchmarks, you also get general news about open source in new hardware.
Keep up the good work!
Even when my focus switched back to Windows, I kept subscribing to it (there were a few times failed to renew though), because I saw value on them.
Sad to see it go, apparently we weren't enough to save them, on a generation that doesn't want to pay for their tools.
Free beer tools, free beer information, free beer everywhere.
And then good quality stuff just vanishes.
Other reformulated: People change interests. Unfortunately Apple is taking the cake of the most desirable gadgets manufacturer and of course Linux never got that traction (how many years have we read about 'This is the year of Linux Desktop'?).
I don't. My employer wants our FOSS core software developed, or wants the bugfix/feature in the FOSS we depend on.
I know people who work for free, but use evidence of that to get well-paid contract work.
Even the guy I know working on a scientific library does that to further his academic career.
I'd be interested to know the situation for significant desktop software (Firefox, Gnome, KDE, a video player, media player, LibreOffice).
Few developers work on FOSS full time for free, at least for very long. However, there is a sizeable group of FOSS developers who do full time or large amounts of part time work for far less than market rate, especially those who are funded primarily through donations. You can go to many smaller projects and see the level of donations they get (e.g. the creators of Godot pay themselves $4400/month, and that is one of the most financially successful small open source projects). I would suspect even for the projects you mentioned above, money is far from the primary motivation of the developers, and they could make more elsewhere.
Successful FOSS businesses usually make money off of selling exceptions, (i.e. selling to non-free software companies) or creating a product with per unit cost (e.g. support).
Essentially, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and so on, have outsourced development to vast amount of unpaid developers; while software focused companies are becoming more and more rare because somewhere, somehow, a bunch of highly skilled engineers think it's a good idea to spend their own time writing something awesome, while at work they complain about how their work is not understood and how management doesn't give a dime about quality engineering. Instead they should deprive these companies of their free labour, group together and build awesome technically written code, and charge money for it.
FOSS projects that tend to be volunteer led, are that way because the developer is scratching their own itch. Maybe I could make money with one of hobbies, but its a risk, and I don't want to spoil something I enjoy so I just develop X in my spare time. I enjoy it, it's something I wouldn't normally get to do and yes as a bonus I can put it on a CV.
Expectations beyond that are unreasonable? You don't have any right to make money from that, any more than a commercial company has a right to make a profit.
And say everyone did what you suggest, its not immediately clear the world would be a better place anyway, maybe google and Facebook only exist because of the existence of Open source....
Perhaps people want to do something that changes the World for the better?
The obvious solution to this is to use the AGPLv3 license for all or most software one writes, which is what I prefer to do, as it's the strongest copyleft license available currently.
We see in many circles that it's not the hip thing to do, to write copyleft software. No, the hip thing to do is write permissively-licensed software and either not care about companies using it as free labor or complaining about a ''social contract'' that wants to be implied, but never explicitly stated as copyleft does.
I believe the trend towards permissive licensing has been pushed mostly by corporate interests and now we see the result. I believe things would be better if every company had to either share its code as copyleft, write everything itself, or actually pay for other proprietary software it could incorporate into its own. That is, I'd rather Grammarly, as an example, have no real option but to purchase an Allegro or Lispworks license, rather than being able to use SBCL and contribute little or nothing.
If I had to guess, a few 100 million dollars in developer time and training.
I know it's a cynical view but it's exactly the principle of an app store: 1) one company puts in all the effort to develop a great product that would otherwise go nowhere unless 2) another company gives it the necessary reach without otherwise contributing too much.
I once got a kind note once from someone working in the film industry who told me my mtf/bkf tool saved their renders after a particularly nasty blunder involving their cluster and backup servers. I'm sure this probably saved them a quarter-million dollars or more, but none of that savings made it my way.
And outside of that one email, over the last nearly thirty years I've received nothing else but abuse and nit. Forks, sure. Patches, a few. But the overwhelming attitude of the open source community is that I work for free, or fuck you.
Well, fuck you guys right back!
HN isn't unique in believing there's some kind of virtue if you can get one over on your fellow man and make a buck on his or her back. Everyone seems to be like that. And if someone complains about it, it turns personal quick, often attacking the economics as you have: Have I contributed more than I've taken? Has anyone? General criticisms of whataboutism and entitlement notwithstanding, this slippery slope doesn't go anywhere good, and despite how well-meaning your question might have been, the reality is it's never enough. Nobody does anything anymore who hasn't stood on the backs of someone else.
This sucks. It sucks bad that Facebook and Google got me to work for free. And to sell ads, no less. How ashamed am I of that?
Do you, for example, think it's good or bad if others have the freedom to use your software to do things you heartily dislike? Or if users you heartily dislike have the freedom to use your software?
But, no, I don't believe other people should have the Freedom to do things I think are Wrong. I don't think anyone believes that.
What exactly do you want to argue? Nobody is saying Google or Facebook is violating the letter of the law (here), but they are certainly abusing our goodwill. Shame on us for not setting the terms finely enough? Or shame on them for being dicks?
I thank my lucky stars that younger me was smart enough to not associate my name with these projects because that would have only made the situation worse. I was able to make a clean break from the projects I was working on after tying up loose ends.
I would value our contributions back to the community at around $500k annually, based on the comp we dump into the teams working on those tools.
Whether the shift of maintainership from unaffiliated individuals to corps is acceptable, beneficial, or harmful, is an open question.
I guess your employer uses a lot more open source than the tools you spend $500k/y on. So your employer contributes to some development and uses lots more. That's not qualitatively different from what I personally do.
when i think of individual oss projects, my brain automatically goes to the old enlightenment window manager, and e12/e13 in particular. it was cool and not very useful compared to fvwm or afterstep, but i think the libraries rasterman worked on in the process wound up being useful elsewhere.
but it's been a long time and i'm recovering from a migraine, so you know.. don't quote me.
Donating a bit of money can really help motivate some folks who would otherwise lose interest. You can also donate your time and create a few pull requests to help out.
Almost all of the contribution: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/2016/08/the-top-10-deve...
And almost all of the money: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/membership/members/