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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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
Donations to for-profit concerns aren't tax deductible for the donor, though.
No. They have to treat the donations as business income. However, when they use it for paychecks for their employees, they get to write off the payroll as a business expense. So unless they get so much money donated that they show a profit (which seems unlikely), the business does NOT end up paying tax on it.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.