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LWN UpdateLWN UpdatePosted Nov 28, 2002 3:21 UTC (Thu) by cyanide (guest, #2236)Parent article: LWN Update With regard to different countries having different subscription rates, think twice before assuming Australians are all penny pinchers. 1 aussie dollar will buy you 2 USD or 3 pound sterling. On the other hand, your average australian will get paid a similar amount of aussie dollars as americans get paid US dollars or poms get paid pounds. Effectively LWN is twice as expensive for australians as americans, whilst the british will have change for a soothing ale.
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LWN Update Posted Nov 28, 2002 9:44 UTC (Thu) by avingar (subscriber, #4249) [Link] I think you meant 1 USD will buy you 2 AUD and 1 pound with buy you 3 AUD :)
LWN Update Posted Nov 28, 2002 12:06 UTC (Thu) by ekj (subscriber, #1524) [Link] Well, the values of the valutas really tell you nothing, the italian Lire for example is almost nothing worth, but this does not mean that Italy is a particularily poor country.A more relevant notion is that of the GDP/capita, or the average income for each person in a country. If we look at this, then we see, for your examples:
On the other hand there *is* many countries where the income is sufficiently much lower that it *does* make a big difference. I strongly suspect that Lwn has almost none, or none subscribing from these countries though, and I think that would be the case even with a much reducded price. For example, the average income in China is about $4.300, or a factor of 8.5 under the US, so to a average person from China Lwn is more than 8 times as expensive as for the average American, expensive enough to be prohibitive. Worse yet if you are for example an average person from Benin (not that the average person from Benin would have internet-access or heard about Linux...), there the national average is $1040 a year, so Lwn would cost 36 times what it costs in the US. I think it'd be too complicated to do much about this though, if Lwn really wanted to welcome aboard those from the poorer countries I would recommend something much simpler such as stating that subscription is free of charge for people from countries with per capita GDP less than say $10K. I doubt there'd be many takers for such an offer though.
Italian Lira Posted Dec 2, 2002 2:00 UTC (Mon) by gproux (guest, #8286) [Link] Died a peaceful death in the beginning of 2002 with the advent of the eurocurrency. Effectively, its value is now 0 or +++ depending if you are a banker or a coin collector.
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