Letters to the editor

Where has the pioneer spirit of LWN gone?

To the LWN Editors,

Let me first thank you folks for the last 4 years of LWN.  I remember
back in 1998, when the very first edition of LWN came out.  One of my
coworkers said to me, "Hey, there's a new Linux site out and it seems
pretty neat."  He was right.  LWN was exactly what the Linux community
needed.  A place where all of the daily and weekly happenings could be
brought together in one place.  I remember fondly the times of waiting
patiently for Wednesdays to come.  It was one of those things I used to
treat myself with when I had a busy day on the job.  I'd happily take my
break by reading the LWN.

However, now, it would appear things have changed a little with the
online e-mag I enjoyed reading.  Now, the question of the viability
comes into question.  Is this a sign of the times?  Where have all the
online pioneers gone?  Remember when LWN was that little site back in
1998?  Did it require 5 full time people writing it up?  Did it require
$15K US/mo to fund?  Certainly the economics are not the same as 1998,
but has it really changed all that much?  The best analogy I can think
of to describe the LWN situation, goes something like this,

	"Mom and Dad send off there best pride and joy to
University/College for the first time.  This is the first time that the
pride of the family has been on his/her own.  Things go well for the
first semester, as the boy/girl works hard to impress the family.  

	"There is much dedication, simply because the family counts on
this performance.  After a while, the pride of the family now discovers
the rest of the University/College world, the joys of credit cards and
other ills.  So, the boy/girl takes one of those credit cards, and
starts to build up the dorm room.  It is now plush, nice, essentially
the same thing, just spruced up a bit with the latest Ikea(tm) and Pier
One(tm) fashions.  

	"The bills start to arrive.  At first, the loan money and things
given as gifts by mom and dad cover the bills, but after a while he/she
realizes that the bills cannot be paid so a job is needed.  After
working at the job, the bills still increase as pride of the family
continues to buy even with the influx of new cash.  Great looking car,
nice dorm room.

	"Now, the pride of the family is in big trouble, having to work
40 hours a week to cover the bills and do 40 hours of classes, burn out
happens.  At the end, the pride of the family must now call mom and dad
and ask for help, or he/she is out of school."  

The end of that analogy is where I believe LWN is today.  In the
beginning, it was new, it was fun and community needed you.  The yearly
Linux Timeline, that was truly a classic.  You could actually see Linux
grow just be following the years events on LWN.  Now it would seem, LWN
is at that "gotta ask mom and dad or I'm gonna quit" stage of
development.

Again I ask, what happened to that pioneering spirit?  Why does the site
need $15K US/month to run?  The LWN justification is,
	"$25,000 is a nice pile of cash for a little company to have in
the bank, but it is important to keep in mind that it is not enough to
keep us going for all that long. Running LWN currently involves five
people (Jonathan Corbet: front and Kernel pages, site code, "executive
editor"; Forrest Cook: Development and Press pages, system
administration; Rebecca Sobol: Distributions and Commerce pages; Dennis
Tenney: Security page and corporate bureaucracy; Dave Whitinger:
business development, ad sales and delivery), all of whom are
experienced software engineers. These people have children and
mortgages, and most work full time producing LWN. They can not be
expected to do it for free, even though that is exactly what they have
been doing for some months now." (http://lwn.net/Articles/5712/, August
1/02)
I do feel a tad insulted by this comment.  The LWN community is almost
arrogantly shrugged off, a very "thanks for all the fish" attitude.  If
a CEO of a company justified a 30% raise when the rest of the company
took a 5% roll-back using this logic, there would be some serious
backlash.  Just because your all brilliant software engineers does not
mean the community needs to shoulder your habits.  If the five LWN
editors took full time jobs working as experienced software engineers
and did LWN as a hobby/not-for-profit out of their own expenses, then
donations are justified.
Why would LWN cost more to produce than Kuro5hin.org?  $70K/yr US vs.
$180k/yr?  I do have a hard time understanding the economics of LWN with
the current rational used.  Why cannot some of this work be outsourced
to the community you have built?  Zack Jones already provides a very
good Kernel summary (http://kt.zork.net).  I am sure the rest of the
site could be parted out that same way, where the LWN editors give the
news there own kind of spin.  Why not work to share your workload?  Why
not turn LWN back into the pioneering site it was?
It would appear the problems are solely related to manpower and
compensating individuals for the "pro bono" work they have in the past.
How did LWN do this back in 1998?  Surely the system administration
cannot be *that* much work?  Why was the new site written from scratch?
It may be impressive to say "Hey, I can write code in Perl and Python",
but why waste so many hours of time on it, when there are many other
viable Open Source solutions.  PHPNuke?  PostNuke?  Why redo the entire
site about one month before you decide to close shop?  Did the LWN
editors know that closing the site would have been a topic of
conversation back in June of this year?  Did this just spring up?  I
surely doubt this.
What truly saddened me, is when the LWN editors decided to slip in there
"closing" as the third article on the July 25, 2002 front-page.  Instead
of being upfront and honest about the problems, it's more of a sad,
"hey, where gone, so long" type situation.  Instead of using the
community to their advantage, LWN decided to say "good bye so long."
That is totally within the prerogative of any editor or business to
close up shop.  However I do contend it was the wrong way to go about
this.
I honestly do hope LWN survives this current situation.  However for it
do so will require all of LWN to return to its roots and definitely not
cost $180K/yr US to do.  That is life folks.  Do it because you love it,
not because it is a chore.  Please accept the fact that LWN has become
more than that little online e-mag you pioneered back in 1998.
In closing, I would just like to say that Mandrake started a very bad
precedent by going the "donate to save us" route.  The same Mandrake
die-hards who donated are the same ones who probably never bought
Mandrake at their local electronics shop.  Granted, LWN is in a
different style of situation, but kicking the community that helped
build you up is really quite sad.  This new kind of "Open Source
Philanthropy" just proves that money and greed will win every time over
good hard work and the fun of just doing it, just because you can.
--Thomas

Thomas Wardman
@Hoser.ca -- Get it eh?

Comments (17 posted)