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On the Future of Linux Weekly News

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the community-chest dept.

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."

7 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. Donations are nice, but... by WanderingGhost · · Score: 4, Insightful
    It's nice to see that they're getting so much support. It usualy isn't clear to people reading the news (or using some other online service) how much work is needed to actually keep the whole thing working.

    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.

  2. Heh, I knew it... by anthony_dipierro · · Score: 1, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Heh, I knew it... by SomeOtherGuy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Hate to say it but this guy has a great point. For less than $12K a month I could analyze, comment and link my ass off. (And go home in my Porshe each night.)

      Scenerio:
      My kids really suck up much of my free time, and my job is about 45-50 hours a week -- still I could most likely eek out about 10-15 hours of "hobby time" each week....My "mad money" could support about 400 gigs a month bandwidth I think....If I were to get together with 3 or 4 people in my same situation -- we could easily run a site like LWN....Or play in a garage band...Or make quilts....Or run a soup kitchen....Hell -- why is it nowdays that everyone running a website thinks they have to make a living from it. Does not anybody make a hobby from this type of thing anymore? Some of my fondest memories of the past came from running my BBS for 10 years. I could buy a whole bucket full of bandwidth for the cost of 5 phone lines.

      --
      (+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
    2. Re:Heh, I knew it... by steveha · · Score: 5, Insightful

      These people are conmen, nothing more.

      Let's see: LWN has been published for 4.5 years, with insightful commentary that has won them many fans. Then they, without asking for money, announced they were going to shut down.

      Yeah, that sounds like pretty standard con-men tactics to me. Set up the suckers for 4.5 years or so, and then trick them into sending donations.

      If you have some spare cash, pass it on to the great guys at XFree86

      There are lots of great places to donate, but I don't need you to tell me which ones are worth the money. I personally find LWN to be more worth reading than PC Week or other paper magazines; if they offered a for-pay subscription, I'd go for it.

      steveha

      --
      lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
  3. Re:I'm going to donate right now... by Dthoma · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I don't think your donations will make a good deal of difference. If they're not making money in the long run, then no matter how much you donate they're eventually going to end up in the red again.

    --

    Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".

  4. It's funny by AirLace · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  5. Flawed argument: LWN is a news site! by Xtifr · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.