Restricted content considered harmful

Restricted content considered harmful

I'm in a minority here but I have misgivings about the
subscription model. I've been reading LWN since 1998,
I know its worth, and I've made a donation like many
others as 'back payment' -- only when it hit home what
dire straits you were in. Yet if it had been a subscription
site from the beginning, I would never have read it. I
just followed a link (I think from uk.linux.org?) and
since you got the lwn.net domain you've never been more
than eight keystrokes away.

I *will* pay for a subscription if LWN goes that way. But I
fear it will put a ceiling on the number of readers of the
Weekly News. The updates are valuable in themselves, but
no more than a hundred other weblogs.

The Weekly News *with* its editorial content is what inspires
the loyalty of readers. Take that away from casual surfers
and Slashdot links, and no new readers will ever get hooked
waiting for Thursdays again. Requiring a login would be a
significant barrier even if there was no payment involved;
setting any price would immediately make LWN too expensive
for many potential readers -- the youngest, the users of
public computers in libraries and schools, those in the
poorest countries -- those who have the most to gain from
free software and the free information you have provided for
so long.

I had expected LWN to shrink somewhat after Tucows dropped
you, rather than to have expanded such that editorial and
administrative work fills five full-time positions. I
hate to see LWN's editors begging as you have done for
some months now (blind as we all were), but LWN will not
be the same publication if it turns to a pay-for-content
model.

Corporate sponsorship is of course the ideal way to fund
your work on LWN -- how many system administrators rely
on your security pages, how many software developers and
webmasters on your development pages, how many engineers
on the kernel commentaries? I hope you achieve great
success in this area. Barring that...

Many readers have shown their willingness to donate money
to help out with the publication of LWN, and I'm certain
that some (me, me!) would also gladly contribute their
own time and expertise.

As I understood it in the early days, Eklektix inc. was a
healthy Web services and consulting business, some of whose
staff took some time out to produce a little bulletin.

Eklektix hasn't advertised its services on LWN since the
Tucows acquisition (has it existed?), and there has been
but one position-wanted advertisement. Has no-one put any
work your way?

I am grateful to you and respectful of the amount of time
you have all *donated* to keep LWN alive. As you point out,
you're all experienced software engineers and you're all
perfectly capable of earning an excellent living, so it
has been a significant sacrifice of income -- and your
desired figure for employing yourselves as staff would
not bring an end to that. For LWN to return to being a
bulletin produced in the spare time from more lucrative
pursuits would not be a tragedy.

Closing the Linux Weekly News to the world *would*.