Ten-year timeline part 4: the end and the beginning [LWN.net]

Ten-year timeline part 4: the end and the beginning

Posted Jan 31, 2008 17:34 UTC (Thu) by graydon (subscriber, #5009)
In reply to: Ten-year timeline part 4: the end and the beginning by rahvin
Parent article: Ten-year timeline part 4: the end and the beginning

Agreed. This is the only website I've ever paid for a subscription. LWN seems to be one of the only sites produced by people who understand the value equation of time and editing.

Most sites that try to offer subscription services try to wow their readers with "lots of content" available through them. But this gets the equation backwards: if I pay for access to their site, I'm paying to have even more of my time spent digging through stuff on the internet. The internet is already packed with free stuff to dig through! What I'm short of is time.

If an editor manages to take some portion of the internet and faithfully, carefully reduce it to something much smaller -- reduce some important firehoses to a 7-page weekly summary -- they're performing a time-saving service that is worth money. If they do it in a timely fashion, and the information is time-sensitive, then a simple time-locked subscription system is perfectly reasonable.

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Ten-year timeline part 4: the end and the beginning

Posted Jan 31, 2008 21:05 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

What he said.

Ten-year timeline part 4: the end and the beginning

Posted Feb 1, 2008 12:42 UTC (Fri) by N0NB (subscriber, #3407) [Link]

Agreed!

At this time I plan to continue to subscribe to LWN and drop Linux Journal when it comes up
for renewal.  Linux Journal no longer caters to the home/hobbyist user but I renewed when Nick
Petreley took over as editor.  Now that they've quietly parted ways, I think I shall too.
That is not an easy decision as I've been an LJ subscriber since 1996.  

I'm not saying that LJ's content is poor, I just don't relate to it very often.  For example,
Reuven Lerner writes an excellent column, but it's wasted pages to me as I don't do enterprise
type web development.

LWN typically has a lot of useful information that even I can relate to.  It's timely and
informative.  LWN doesn't waste its time trying to convince me to use some web development
acronym of the week.  Instead it focuses on Linux kernel development in particular and the
Free Software community in general and those are of most importance to me.

LWN gives me consistent news about the Free Software community and that's what I value most.

Horse's mouth

Posted Feb 2, 2008 23:08 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

Agreed again. It's also the only magazine I subscribe to, great value for the money.

I actually do enterprise web development, and use some of those acronyms in my daily routine through enterprise-style chaos, so I don't relate to lots of LWN content. However, I value solid software engineering in kernel development as in any other field. Lots of ideas are usable in any kind of environment.

Plus, my favorite point: LWN is the only place I know where the news meets the newsmakers. You can read our editors' take about something and then read a comment from the horse's mouth, be it an average Debian developer or Linus himself.