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Linux Format Magazine Team Quits, Launches New Profit-Donating Mag
An anonymous reader writes "What happens when the editorial team of the biggest-selling English Linux magazine gets frustrated? They leave their company and start a new one. Most of the writers behind Linux Format have jumped ship and started Linux Voice, a social enterprise magazine which will donate 50% of its profits back to the community, and freely license its content under Creative Commons after 9 months. They're running a fundraiser on Indiegogo with already a quarter of their funding goal reached. Will this shake up the whole publishing industry?"
All of it, including e-books, textbooks, gideon's bibles, governing documents, and assorted collections of essays, poems, children's bedtime stories, and death notices?
I mean, I don't /think/ so...
Dear Management,
Feedback isn't just the noise Jimmy Hendricks made with his guitar. It's a vital part of maintaining a quality workforce. If you fail at employee morale you will fail at keeping your staff.
Sincerely,
Your Non-Mechanized Employees
No.
Will this shake up the whole publishing industry?
NO
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
Wonder why the quit though! Anyhow, donated for a real subscription.
Even a Linux *magazine* ends up a hopeless mire of competing distros.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
These days, all it takes to shake up the whole publishing industry is to be successful. The whole industry is in sharp decline and everyone knows it, especially those within.
I'd like to think they have a chance. Their goals are certainly noble. But I wouldn't be too optimistic.
It won't even shake up the english linux publishing industry....if there is such a thing.
"Will this shake up the whole publishing industry?" Yes.. In the same way that the extinction of the Dodo stopped all other species from going extinct.
Not just "no" but "HELL NO."
Chances are probably even more minor. After they go in operation for a while and experience a lot of the decisions they need to do to stay operational, they will probably start making the same "Stupid" decisions their bosses made, that caused them to quite in disgust.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The consensus seems to be that Linux Voice won't shake up the publishing industry. But if it ticks along nicely, ploughint profits back into FOSS organisations, and gives stuff away under a free licence, that'll still be pretty good. Maybe not a revolution on the 1917 or 1789 scale, but maybe revolutionary in a more modest, 1830 Paris uprising kind of way.
We're still operating largely under the false premise that information is scarce. Bits are in near infinite supply, digital data thus should tend towards zero price regardless of cost to create (if we're to believe Economics:101). Only via artificial scarcity of information are any able to monetize the bits themselves. Piracy can only exist because artificial scarcity is being leveraged.
The bits are not scarce. The work to create or discover new information in new combinations of bits is what is scarce. Market your ability to do work. Get paid for that work once. Ask for enough up front to cover your expenses for the work just like in ANY other market: See also, Mechanics. Bid, do the work, get paid; No fee each time you start the car and benefit from the work. You want more money? Do more work.
Copyright and Patents are a horrible futures market for your work. You under pay yourself for the chance to make more money from your work. However, this means secrecy and thus lack of market research in most cases, leading to high churn rates and lack of job stability and thus lower pay. Working for the community directly is the same as working for a pubilsher: You get paid the same for the same work done once. The difference is there's no middle men trying to inflate the price via artificial scarcity while adding zero benefit to the product itself.
This is the first generation of the Age of Information wherein every single person is a publisher. Of course there will be huge changes and growing pains. This very comment is published. Copies are cheap! This data was duplicated many times in many routers before you saw it, and multiple times in your computer's storage, RAM, and video memory. No one should be paying for individual copies; We'll pay for the work to create the first copy, and that's it (it's the only one that was scarce). Publishing as we know it will either become extinct or adapt. Publishers will become publicists or agents instead who advertize your ability to perform work.
I've said this time and again. We now live in a post-information-scarcity world. Times are changing fast. Interestingly enough markets are aligning with the FOSS model of development: Paid to do work, release the output for "free" (since it's already been paid for), do more work to get more money. This is the same model that all other labor markets use, it only seems alien if you conflate infinitely reproducible information with the concept of finite resources like property. Artificial scarcity is untennable. Deal with it.
Questions like this pop up every time something gets funded by crowdsourcing, without fail. It's kind of funny to people in their most blindly optimistic states, but it's also getting a little old.
They didn't sign a non-compete clause w/ Linux Format? The organizer can stil probably be sued. That's where the campaign funds are going--lawyers.
What is the "frustration", that cause them all to quit, about?
According to the Indiegogo page
Last month we quit, and we quit because we wanted to do something different. We want to create an even better magazine; a bigger, more entertaining and more accountable magazine for the community we love to serve.
So, what this really sounds like is a crowdfunded startup; cause we want to.
Why am I even vaguely surprised to find that this story is actually just another Slashvertizement?
Give me a break!
Which, if they buy enough hookers and blow, will be zero. Nonprofits make me sick. They're inevitably smug and holier than thou, while they're just working the system.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Nothing a pair of programmers can fix.
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
Oh I don't know, it's just doubled in size for a start.
you can't fork the magazine.. did you guys get confused between the free, open source software you write about and the copyrighted, commercially produced publication those articles get published in?
this is not the same as openoffice developers bailing after oracle bought the project... nor is it the same as xfree86 migration to xorg after a major license change... this is just a bunch of whiny little babies
I wish the Linux Format team well. I will be sponsoring them in this new venture. It takes a lot of guts to walk out of your job and start something new and risky like this.
I got RedHat 6.0 (I think) from a copy of LinuxFormat well over 10 years ago. It was the first taste of Linux, which has been a journey I have never regretted. That is why I am supporting them. They do an excellent work of advocacy, have produced one of the very few magazines to increase in circulation in recent years and make an excellent podcast too!
Go for it guys!
Putting the back catalog into the public domain is an interesting idea actually.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
who?
They should just contribute their articles to Linux Weekly News so we don't need to setup another subscription.
The fact that they think they'll have profits to donate just shows how naive they are. Best of luck to them though.
It won't even shake up the english linux publishing industry....if there is such a thing.
There certainly is such a thing, but they generally prefer to be known as the British or UK Linux publishing industry. England is only part of the UK.
I think my three favorite articles were on the "tea," "curry," and "bitters" commands.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
I love when something thinks that they "own" their human capital and then that capital gets up and leaves. This is a story that I wish would happen on a daily basis.
I bought last months LinuxFormat and it had really lost it's soul. The magazine seemed to have already died a few months before.
The main thing about LF 2-5 years ago was the humour. I think there was some kind of handover from AmigaFormat where you had guys like JonoBacon taking over. The big thing though was that it had a sense of humour. It was very funny, and in a British way too. That made it stand out from everything else, only Micromart sometimes had something a bit like this but that's been inconsistent.
Jono Bacon went on to Ubuntu as community manager and also wrote Art of the Community (which I'd like to point out is currently down from ~£40 to £4 on Amazon!). Kind of a shame the old crew aren't back together in entirety. I hope this new project can grab the attention.
I can see lots of people talking about the community donation aspect but for me the first thing that struck me was that this could have elements of the LinuxOutlaws style humour to it too. That would be great but it's no guarantee.
Having a community involvement in any way makes the whole thing that more interesting.
By the spirit of RMS I bless this project
A blog I run for the wealth
information is scarce
It's a common misconception that information is not scarce. In fact information is so rare that people hardly ever recognise it.
What we do have is a surfeit of data, or more correctly: noise.
People or systems that can separate the data from the noise are definitely worth paying for. People who can derive information from that data are to be valued. The problem is that apart form information being scarce, individulas and organisations that can recognise information are even scarcer.
Bits, by themselves are nothing. Most of them have negative value as they require effort to remove them from the useful stuff. Think mining: you have to churn through huge amounts of ore to get a few flecks of gold.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons