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On the Future of Linux Weekly News
Trevelyan writes "This article on LWN shows they are not alone, it seems that since they announced they will finish 1 August, loads of people have been emailing their support, and donating money, $12,000 as of this writing."
Now, althought I think donations are a nice thing, I wonder if they'll be able to solve the long-term problem: they need a steady stream of money getting in, and donations are not exactly the Right Way to achieve that. I wish them good luck (really). They have offered us a great site.
It's wonderfull to see everyone donating money to help LWN get back on it's feet. However what is LWN going to do so it not back in the same place in 6 months? $12,000 only goes so far
Maybe they should read the Kuro5hin stories on this subject?
1. The fundraiser ends, and the next stage begins (Support Kuro5hin, Kuro5hin.org)
posted by rusty on 06/21/2002 11:23:29 AM EST
123 comments
2. Day two wrapup, and a change of plans (Support Kuro5hin, Kuro5hin.org)
posted by rusty on 06/20/2002 08:21:06 AM EST
84 comments
3. Day one wrapup, and a special day two gift (Support Kuro5hin, Kuro5hin.org)
posted by rusty on 06/19/2002 10:20:36 AM EST
186 comments
4. The Future of K5, and the First Ever Kuro5hin Fundraising Drive (Support Kuro5hin, Focus On...)
posted by rusty on 06/18/2002 07:26:16 AM EST
358 comments
5. We're Broke: The Economics of a Web Community (Meta, Kuro5hin.org)
posted by rusty on 06/17/2002 04:18:46 AM EST
737 comments
How to Download YouTube Videos
I'm back from 10 days holidays, and I'm very sad to learn that Linux Weekly News is going to end. It's really one of the best Linux news site, and deserves to stay alive until they can find a real business model so they can pay all the contributors. Why wouldn't they provide paying archives or provide extra services (instant Linux news or rumours, Linux people connecting (for business for instance)...). It seems Mandrake found its way to profitability, so I'm sure Linux Weekly News can also do it!
The Linux community *needs* LWN, so please stay alive!
I'm going to provide them right now my $5 paypal & a wire transfert of 50 Eur.
Guys... This was posted on LWN 2 days ago. Anyone who has not read it already is probably not an LWN reader anyway and so probably not interested. Why report this now?
On a brighter note... If you like LWN then give them some of your hard earned money to help them continue their excellent service to the community!
Thanks.
It seems that if you intend to do anything related to the Open Source Movement, then you'd better put aside any hope of making money and do it for the love.
The impending death of LNUX and the soon to be dead LWN are just more proof.
When I saw the original story (LWN.net Closing Down), and read "next weeks issue will be the last" I knew it was just a threat to try to raise money. If you really need to shut down, just shut down.
All this donating to for-profit corporations sickens me. If you want donations from me, you need to be at least a nonprofit, and preferably a 501(c)(3).
If you can't afford to run your website, allow mirrors to do it for you.
I doubt $12,000 is enough, but if we all chipped in a dollar, LWN would theoratically have $600,000. That should be enough. However, some of us don't like Linux. So, the chances of this are nil.
1. Give Away Code
2. ???
3. Profit
It seems PayPal offer $1 to every new account. If all Linux users open a PayPal account and wire the $1 to LWN, they will get millions dollars. I just wired my free $1!
Free Software is all good and dandy. But as is noticed by MANY Open Source Software, there are in fact mortgages to pay, taxes to pay, etc.
And what I see is that Open Source and etc individuals are cheap skates. Ok I donate 10 dollars, but is that really what our work is worth?
I think we need to get it through our heads that yes LINUX and Open Source did change the game. But the game is not free, just lower costs. So instead of paying 800 USD for a development environment, we need to start coughing up 99 USD for a development environment.
Imagine how much further Open Source would be IF everybody who uses Open Source were to donate 1000 USD per year. Why 1000 USD? MS developers typically pay about 3K for their MSDN, plus other extras. I just decided to put something that I think anybody who makes a living from software could afford, EVEN when unemployed.
When you do that type of math then Open Source does make economic sense...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Now, who was it again that said Linux users are cheap elitists?
Since they are gonig under anyway, perhaps they could forward the cash to the goatse guy. I have noticed that the picture is loading slow lately, probably due to increased bandwidth from slashdot trolls.
If their business plan doesnt work, like hell I'm going to support a BROKEN BUSINESS PLAN. ANyways, all that announcement was to do was leach from the community.
If I remember correctly, good articles come from sites like kuro5hin.org (most CERTAINLY NOT this site) yet the authors don't get paid. Perhaps if LWN changed to a non-for-profit model, it would live. Never the less, I dont care.
If you examine the burn rate and remaining cahs on hand, it's clear that VA Linux will be bankrupt within a year.
Slashdot is like a rich man's trophy wife - expensive to keep, but good for showing off to other people. VA Linux may try to get rid of this noose around their neck. Maybe by selling it, maybe by giving it back to Malda & co. But even then, can slashdot support itself? I doubt it. It's too big, too expensive to run and maintain. The slashdot community won't donate enough to cover costs. Especially when lameness filters and other policies alienate people towards other sites.
A shame, really.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
These guys write about Linux and that's great and everthing, but do they really need to be a profit-making company to keep it up? And more to the point, does it make sense to donate money to a company? A friend of mine (who I'm not going to plug) set up a project to develop some low-level libraries for serial port communication, just to help other Linux projects (mainly to do with mobile phones / IrDA) and he's been hacking on it 2 hours a day for the last 6 months. Yet he reckons his job is thankless, and the only pro for him is to see his code used extensively by other projects. He would _love_ a small token of appreciation, even if it's just a postcard or a stuffed penguin or something, but he'd never go so far as to ask for it. It seems the only people who are ready to put aside their principles to ask for money are those who contribute less of the stuff that actually matters -- the code.
Do we really want a community where the merchandise / documentation industries get all the cash and limelight? Ximian makes more money selling stuffed monkeys than it does selling support services or software and these authors are getting more money writing _about_ the code than the actual coders are ever actually likely to see for their efforts. Sometimes it makes me wonder if there's something to the Microsoft way of doing things -- write code during the day, get a paycheck at the end of the month, end of story.
Now is better than after August 1st.
Also because this might be the first time someone will be slashdotted with donations.
Because those guys are really great human beings working against the odds and against disease, amidst an ocean of political stupidity (see DMCA, UCITA, CPDP-whatever...). Everytime I see someone stamping Americans with the general "idiot" label, these are some of the guys to prove Americans can be greater than America (i.e., US) itself.
Because they're doing it out of love and not money. They need money now, ok -- but a certain monopoly needs love and guess who will get what first...
On a personal suggestion to them:
Join some other site (like www.dailynews.net) and cut costs -- maybe some people have to go, but lwn may manage to survice this way.
Best of luck to you all, folks!
And thank you for the extreme high-level unpaid work. You rock!
I hope Liz gets better asap, too -- they keep researching new powerful medicines everyday... have Faith!
Of course, /.'s people do a great job, but it would survive even with fewer guys, I think.
Now is a good time to cut costs, however.
Every organisation, for-profit or not, must slash costs.
Paid people are great (and a minimum of them is needed), but volunteers an do a good work, too, if you let them.
WTF does voting for Ralph Nader have to do with your point? It seems to me that wealthy upper class people would not vote for Nader since he was against globalization and imperialism. It's more likely that Boulder residents would want Bush or more likely Gore. They both are in favor of NATO, The World Bank, the IMF and all the other neoliberal establishments. Colorado is heavily dependent on a military economy which would benefit from the politician's sons embodied in Gore and Bush. The overwhelming majority of Nader voters stand against those concepts. If Gore would have been elected in 2000 nothing would have changed. There would still be a "war on terrorism", corporate scandals and an ever increasing American empire.
What makes you think Open source companies are any different? We should be shocked if any succeed given the number of market and institutional impediments they face.
It took at least two hundred years for the existing business model to develop. Expect it to take more than a few years for a new model to take hold. The inroads Open Source has mode so far are nothing short of phenomenal.
Even Microsoft is starting to see the writing on the wall. Software as a retail item is an all but dead model. that is why they are pushing for a service based model. That is why they see Open Source as such a threat. I've said it before and I'll say it again,"What happens when Open Source matches commercial quality and usability? What happens when software becomes a commodity?". My answer is that you have to sell the service. You will still need someone to install, maintain, customize and use the software. For most, the software is the tool. Like a hammer to build a house.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
That's your job - I guess I'll have to settle with selling my body to Sarah Michelle Gellar and Jennifer Love Hewitt.
Sigh - why do *I* always have to do that.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
I wonder if this is going to be the beginning of a new business model: threatening to go out of business and then watching the donations rolling in. It sort of reminds me of these old bands/musicians that have a farewell tour every year.
rooooar
Nader lawn signs were all over Boulder in the election runup. The Boulder university campus is something else, must be because it's downstream of the old Rocky Flats weapons site, now a housing development.
BTW, I was just at LWN advertisers page. The links are hosed, staff can't even code a simple stinking link.
They should move to Georgetown, had a stripper for mayor. Cheaper rent.
never seen a cheaper bunch of people.
If you don't pay you don't play.
1 month ain't gonna cut folks. Are you willing to pay 9.95 per month per webzine you like to see...I doubt it.
12,000 is nice, but I am sure that 120,000 would be far more useful, and 1.2 million or even 12 million would be needed to ensure a long term future.
Not exactly at the right order of magnitude.
It would be interestin toi know what the exact financilas are, but this is likely confidential information.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Oh, I don't know... maybe the part about GIVING THEIR PRODUCT AWAY FOR FREE???
What happens when Open Source matches commercial quality and usability?
The open source model encourages substandard usability. Sometimes when I'm struggling with a really difficult piece of software (say, Sendmail), I wonder if the author has deliberately made it hard to use... I think this happens more than we'd like to admit. If open source products were easy to use, how would the company get paid to install and maintain them?
If you want to see a successful business model that uses open source, but isn't an "Open Source company", take a look at Apple. They base the internals of their OS on open standards and BSD licensed software, and on top of this they build an easy to use, commercial interface, with consistent menus, windows, and installation procedures. Now that is an open source success story! The dotbombs like VA Linux, Turbo Linux, Eazel, [your favorite company here], and in a few years, Red Hat, have been total failures.
Let's face the facts: The open source development model is good for some things, but not all things.
it's kinda hard to find since it is only displayed in bold letters Donating Online , but i think you can handle it. i plan to begin donating as soon as i get done with grad school. dont let that stop you-you can start right now :)
-- john
So did Taco et al actually get rich off the stock thing? I know unlike the general public they had to wait to sell the stock. On paper they were worth a boatload a while ago. So did they have to chance to sell before the stock tanked? If they did,they would certainly have plenty of cash to buy and run the site on their own. Just wondering.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Thats an incredibly fucked up thing you just said. I mean is it absolutely MANDATED that ANYONE who has ANYTHING to do with the open source community must make do with meager wages? WTF is wrong with Rusty making $70k a year? You even said yourself that it includes expenses so you KNOW he's not taking home the entire $70k.
Maybe he might want to save for his retirement? Maybe he's married or thinking of getting married? Maybe he might want to save up for his kids or future kids college education? WTF are you gonna do that on $36k a year? Maybe he wants more at the end of his life then just grattitude from a "community" that has little to no grasp on issues beyond the keyboard, such as finances? Living frugally. Fuck. You should be lucky Rusty wants to do what he does period. Especially with jerks like you in the audience.
If the LWN staff is fine living with $36k per year, more power to them. I just hope they run into more appreciative readers than Rusty obviously has. Shit if the man wants to drive a Porche and live in a Manhattan condo and K5 makes that possible for him then MORE POWER TO HIM! Fuck the open source, free EVERYTHING losers who want enterprising individuals or groups of people to live in near poverty as long as they are faithful to the "cause". Run a website that contributes to the community? Great! You just better not ever try to make a lot of money or the community will turn on you like a rabid pack of dogs for the sacrilege and blasphemy of doing well!!!!!
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Redhat burns just a couple million each year, they've got about $200 million on hand. Unless of course Szulik pays himself a bonus.
LWN's problem, as the market stands today, is that a website by itself is unable to bring in sufficient revenue to support full time employees, let alone multiple full time employees. Even considering the $12K in donations, that will not last more than a month, by their salary standards, and chances are good that will not be a repeating phenomenon as the slashdot link was probably responsible for a good part of it.
Advertising as they've stated won't cover their expenses. And the level of advertising that will probably will be so annoying that it will drive off too many people. I've noticed this problem with my own site. Even a small banner ad would clutter up the page too much, and would probably bring me less than $100 a month anyway.
Subscriptions are a possibility assuming anyone would pay them. $1 a month from every one of the lwn regulars would pay their requested salaries with NO problem. However, most people won't subscribe even if they feel the content is worth it. There is plenty of material out there for free. Being forced to support something doesn't usually win you many fans.
You could always gather personal data and sell it to marketers, but that's just slimy and will piss people off more than subscriptions would.
Then there are donations. While donations are great so long as they're completely unconditional, that's not always the case. I've got people that bitch because I don't have a domain. So every once in a while someone offers to send me $10 so I can get one. Problem is, I won't spend that $10 on a domain, I'll use it to pay my water bill, rent, or something else that's far more important to me than a domain is. That donator would feel shafted, and I would understand that. If his money was going to the site itself, the donation would be justified, but when it goes to pay for my own peronal expenses, it feels more like charity. Donations would certainly help, but the added burden of assumed obligation would create more problems than its worth. In LWN's case, its pretty clear that the donations are going to pay salaries and not much else. But from the tone of their most recent report on the issue, it would seem that some people might not have been aware of that fact.
The only option that *I* have found that would be reasonable to me and my visitors would be merchandising. Either selling site specific novelty items, or selling useful equipment. Profits from these sales could then fund both the
site and partially fund my salary, but with sales you open a new can of worms. You have customer relations, ordering, payments, warranty issues, shipment tracking, etc. Its a full time job just maintaining something like that on any significant scale. Which means that a substancial amount of the immediate profit gets churned back into the business of producing, packaging, and selling, which means, if I'm doing it, is a lot less time I'm spending on the site, which was the whole point of searching for extra revenue in the first place. Of course, to make it easy on myself, I could just take payments by check only and offer no warranty whatsoever on what I sell. A lot of people would turn away from this, but at least the cost of bringing in extra revenue would not exceed the revenue itself, and those that wish to "donate" at least get something tangible in return, regardless how I actually choose to spend the money.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
The job LWN does is quite excellent--and this sort of excellence requires real effort. You don't get that kind of quality and coverage from dilettante's who spend an hour here or there. $12k/month barely pays two IT salaries, once you count insurance, social security contribution, workers comp, and similar expenses. I own a business, I know this.
Moreover, I am also a professional writer, so I probably have a lot better idea than AirLace about just how much work goes into LWN's summaries. I don't write quite the same thing--but there is some similarity (my name is Mertz, btw, you can find what I do at IBM dW, Intel IDS, and elsewhere). I often write about a certain library or software product, and it really is a good week of work to become familiar enough with something to write a helpful 2500 words on the topic. Doing 52 such research projects a year is about what I could handle (and I'm a bright person).
What LWN does is in some respects similar. True, they only write a couple sentences about each given product... but those couple sentences are consistently accurate, clear, and informative. Each one of those sentences represents probably an hour of work. LWN covers dozens or hundreds of topics each week! Each one of them requires just this kind of research... and, well, that's a few full time workers.
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Only 12K, that means a small fraction of this visitors that read the site are sending in money. ALso is LWN is it legal for LWN to take donations without being a not-for-profit? Does thi smean LWN has too treat the "donations," as investments?
Personally, I think this is LWN's fault. Everyone on the web knows the times are changing, and that the advertising only business model doesn't work. Slashdot figured this out, why couldn't LWN?
LWN's only chance is to try to roll out a premium service, and quickly.
When you view Open Source as a commercial venture vs. hobbyist Open Source you begin to see the difference. Each time a company wants to start a commercial venture they have at least one big advantage - they don't have to start from scratch. Ventures, successful or not, return at least two benefits back to the community - the development improvements and experience.
Compared to closed or traditional ventures, the companies have to start from virtual scratch and when they fail most of their development and experience is either locked up in legal limbo or sold to another competitor for pennies on the dollar.
Keep in mind that what you see in Open Source applications is about the level of quality you saw around the time when Windows 95 first entered the market. Big projects like KDE and OpenOffice are just getting to the stage of development where the features are there but the usability and stability issues haven't been ironed out. From here on out the real game begins. Open Source is just starting to be taken seriously. Heck, if you would have asked even a hardcore Open Source advocate a year ago if it were likely that Wal-Mart would ever sell Linux based computers in the retail market they would have scoffed.
Sure, there are plenty of issues to be ironed out. But if every Open Source and Linux company dropped off the face of the earth tomorrow it would have negligible effect. The next wave of developers would pick up the pieces and move on. Can't say the same for Microsoft or Lotus. Their products would die and users would be left high and dry.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Going from "LWN is folding," to "open source is failing," is quite a stretch.
If kernel.org or even debian.org were about to fold, then you might have a point. But neither is in any danger of disappearing. LWN, while it's a wonderful site, is just a free news site. Plenty of non-linux/open-source news sites are in trouble or dead (including many that I worked with fairly recently). And so this merely goes to show that web-only news sites are probably not a reliable way to make money at this point in time. While I'm saddened to see LWN go, I still have my Debian system, and I still have my subscription to Linux Journal. I've had 'em for years, and expect to have 'em for years to come.
IBM, HP, even Sun, and thousands of smaller (and/or less computer-oriented) organizations all have a vested interest in keeping kernel.org up and running. HP and hundreds of other companies have a vested interest in keeping debian.org up. Those sites are in absolutely no danger.
Don't underestimate the power of cooperation as a competitive force.
Have you read the hidden comment about slashdot in the article?
You are a bit off the mark re RMS, it is well known he has had groupies, and Doctress Neutopia was one of them. No reason to believe he has given up the hippie life style.
You then, got laid lately? No?
Fun to see we ACs are being vetted by the alimighty modders though...
And the consequence?
Imagine it, it is year 2005 and all tickers source other tickers. This story will live forever ticking over and over. Readers will return to reading books. Bliss!
-- Do we really want a community where the merchandise / documentation industries get all the cash and limelight?
Funny you should say that. I write HOWTOs, at the Linux Documentation Project. I don't get paid. I get no limelight. I got 8 CDs from Yggrasil and the Linux Undercover from RedHat. I get no babes, no groupies here.
I do, however, get the occational "thankyou" in my email. It makes me happy. And that is all I want. This is after all my hobby. LWN, on the other hand, hoped to make it into a full time job. 2-3 years ago it did look plausible they could evolve into the most central magazine for free/open software.
I have had the pleasure of communicating with them regarding LDP work and do wish them all the best.
"$1 a month from every one of the lwn regulars would pay their requested salaries with NO problem. "
Then why not? 12$ US a year + an option to buy a year of content on CD for 5$ US seems pretty good. You get to read all the time if you just want the news, and for reseachers you can buy all their back news for 5$/year. That's pretty cheap compared to some archival places. Maybe they have a special 16$ offer for regulars which gives them automatic CD support, 11 months, + 1 free bonus month.
That's something even I, on minimum wage (currently 137$ US a week where I live) can afford.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.