Some LWN notes

Subscriptions to LWN continue to grow, but that growth continues to be slow. Very slow. Various schemes for improving the situation are in the works, but various complications have impeded the process. We are contemplating hiring another editor to help to expand and improve the LWN content mix; those plans remain vague at this time.

We are always looking for writers, however. To that end, we have raised our (still inadequate) pay scales a bit. If you have something to say to the community, and you are willing to write for demanding editors and even more demanding readers, please have a look at the writing for LWN page and contact us.

Readers of the RSS feeds may have noticed some changes which have been made there. It has (slowly) occurred to us that RSS seems to be the primary interface to the site for many readers, and that maybe we should pay a bit of attention to it. There is also a new feed which tracks the most recently posted comments; anybody who is interested in tracking the LWN discussion across the site is encouraged to subscribe. See the LWN headlines page for a full list of available feeds; expect to see some others before too long.

Maybe someday we'll implement an Atom feed and be properly buzzword compliant, but that is rather lower on the list of priorities.

When LWN first started allowing comment posting, some readers predicted that one result might be the death of the "Letters to the Editor" page. Those readers may well have been right; the Weekly Edition almost never includes a Letters page anymore, because there are no letters to publish on it. So we are considering just dropping that page altogether. The alternative, for those who would like to see that page retained, would be to start sending us letters.

Occasionally we get queries from people who would like to reuse content published on LWN, often translated into other languages. We have never yet refused such a request. We are still evolving a complete policy on licensing of LWN content, but it will look something like this:

• Subscriber-only content is "all rights reserved," and we ask that it not be redistributed during the subscriber-only period. We are currently evaluating various DRM technologies for controlling access to these articles; we assume that LWN readers would not object to, say, loading a binary-only browser extension to access our content.

  OK, so maybe some people would object. We won't do that.

• All LWN-authored content which is not in subscriber-only mode can be treated as available under the Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike license. We will eventually change the notices on the site to make this licensing explicit.

• Postings from public mailing lists and comments on the site are owned by their original authors. Anybody wanting to reuse that material should contact the author for permission.

• Articles from guest authors (those which carry a "this article was contributed by" banner) continue to be owned by those authors. We may try to get an explicit right to put a free license on at least some of those articles, but, to this date, we have not done so. So anybody wanting to reuse material from a guest author should contact that author; we can facilitate that communication if need be.

This policy is still under development; we're interested in any suggestions or advice that anybody might have.

Finally, for those of you who will be at the Ottawa Linux Symposium this year, LWN editor Jonathan Corbet will be talking on the state of Linux kernel development. It is, at this point, almost as traditional as the Black Thorn party.