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Crowdfunded Linux Voice Magazine Releases First Issue CC-BY-SA
M-Saunders (706738) writes Linux Voice, the crowdfunded GNU/Linux magazine that Slashdot has covered previously, had two goals at its launch: to give 50% of its profits back to the community after one year, and release each issue's contents under the Creative Commons after nine months. Well, it's been nine months since issue 1, so the whole thing is now online and free to share. Readers and supporters have also made audio versions of articles, for listening to on the commute to work.
I haven't read this magazine yet; diidn't realize it existed until today.
However, the computer industry moves so quickly -- is the information stale or outdated nine months after initial publication? If so, what's the point, other than a public relations exercise? This may be vulnerable to the same malady that killed the paper computer magazines of the 80's and 90's.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
1. There are HTML versions of many of the articles. 2. We're giving this away for free! To share and adapt. Feel free to pull the text from the PDFs and put it up on GitHub. If you're still angry about PDFs, we'll happily give you your money back... Oh wait, you got it for free! :-)
They offer HTML versions of each article on their website too. Look a bit further down the page past the pdf link and you'll find them.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
Here we go again, /. at its worst. /. appears to be all about.
A 116 page CC licensed magazine with dozens of articles, and our comments?
That their format sucks, that it's out of date, that there is a smell spelling error on page 87, and so on.
Way to go guys and gals, a fine example of what
PDF is an open standard, has been since 2008. Didn't you get the memo?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
PDF was a proprietary format, controlled by Adobe, until it was officially released as an open standard on July 1, 2008, and published by the International Organization for Standardization as ISO 32000-1:2008,
The fact that they used a Mac to create the PDF is a slightly more valid complaint. Note I said slightly.
We (the editorial staff) use FOSS to make the magazine content: in my case Vim, AbiWord, Gimp etc. We're all geeks and not designers, so we hired one, and her tool of choice is InDesign. We would like to move over to Scribus at some point though -- and possibly even fund some missing features that we'd need to make the magazine!
Also, I was under the impression that PDF was an open format, just Adobe's reader is closed. PDF will make most people happy.
I'm surprised nobody sad TeX should have been used....
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
I just wanted to say that I bought a subscription to this magazine, and it was money well spent. Great great great read. More Linux than you can handle.
Disclaimer: I'm right in their target demo: Intermediate Linux user. Computer n00bs and crusty old SysAdmins may have a different experience.
M-Saunders, please ignore the hate and thanks for your enlightened views on publishing. I was disappointed when you guys "forked" LinuxFormat but I have enjoyed what I have consumed of the new magazine and podcast. I hope your business model is sustainable and look forward to catching up with the issues I've missed.
Testiculos habet et bene pendentes.
It is now. Portable Document Format (PDF) wasn't officially open until 2008. For a while it was in limbo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format
No good deed goes unpunished.
It's a manual download from the website. We e-mail everyone once it's up, then you can grab it when you want. There are full issue PDFs and ePubs, and per-article PDFs.