A new era for LWN
[Posted September 25, 2002 by corbet]
When the plans for LWN.net were being laid, back toward the end of 1997, we
(Liz Coolbaugh and Jonathan Corbet) set out to create a high-quality news
source that would allow the Linux community to keep up with the incredible
pace of its development. Plus, of course, we wanted to draw attention to an
ill-advised support operation that we were launching at the same time. The
support offerings are long since forgotten, but LWN has grown with the
community it reports on. LWN, now approaching its fifth anniversary,
processes a great deal of news and requires several people for its
production. As readers of these pages have been told too many times,
advertising does not cover even a fraction of the costs of producing LWN,
and similar types of revenue, such as corporate sponsorships, are mostly
unavailable.
Back in July, we had come to the conclusion that LWN was not a sustainable
operation, and that it was time for us to move on to other endeavors. The
result was an amazing and unexpected show of support from our readers, in
the form of donations, that caused us to rethink things. An unexpected
show of, well, something else from our (former) credit card processor
slowed that rethink greatly, but the time has now come. LWN is now at a
definitive, and possibly final, crossroads.
We will now try to transition LWN into a subscription-based publication,
supported by the readers that benefit from it. If LWN is valuable enough
to its readers to earn that support, we will continue to produce it - and
try to make it better. If not, well, then we will search for some other
way to use our skills in the free software community.
Here's the deal: a basic LWN subscription will cost $5/month, with options
for those wanting to pay a little less or a little more. Starting
October 3, the LWN Weekly Edition will be available only to
subscribers for the week following its publication; thereafter it will be
freely available to all. Some other features, such as the ability to
receive news via email, will be available to subscribers only. Other new
features which we may introduce in the future will also be restricted to
subscribers, at least initially. The LWN front page and the news items
posted there will remain free, as will our security database, kernel patch page, and various
other features of the site.
What this means is that all news posted to LWN will continue to be freely
available - if you are sufficiently patient. But we strongly hope that
most of our regular readers will consider becoming subscribers in order to
have immediate access to our content, and, most importantly, to help keep
LWN operating.
Those of you working in the software field may want to consider asking your
employers to fund an LWN subscription as a useful tool for your job. Or,
even better, have them talk to us about group subscriptions, which can
provide access to LWN's subscription
content for an entire group, company, or university at substantial savings
in cost.
We have a lot of ideas for where we would like to take LWN. We would like
to cover many important development projects the way we cover Linux kernel
development now. We would like to have Linux in Business coverage that is
more than a pile of press releases. It would be great to be able to pay
for occasional articles by well-known authors. We will release our
site code as free software as soon as we find the time to do it.
It would be nice, even, to
have a search engine that truly works well for the first time ever.
But first we have to stabilize LWN and turn it into a sustainable
operation, and an important part of that process is now in the hands of our
readers. With sufficient support from you, we can take LWN forward and
make it better than ever: a reader-supported community news resource which
need not worry about keeping big advertisers happy. If LWN is worthwhile
to you, now is the time to act; please consider signing up for a subscription today.
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