Is it really The End? [LWN.net]

Is it really The End?

Posted Aug 1, 2002 15:52 UTC (Thu) by anamana (subscriber, #2787)
In reply to: Is it really The End? by Mithrandir
Parent article: Is it really The End?

I agree with Mithrandir. I've donated last week and I would still be
willing to pony up a subscription price for the forthcoming content.

A good SciFi author (Heinlein) gave us the acronym TANSTAAFL - There
Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch - and we've been ignoring this
(as a community) so far. The price has been getting payed; mostly
out of the generous effort of the LWN staff. We should be shouldering
the cost of the content we are receiving.

The LWN content is far and away the best I've seen on the net. If we
want it to continue, we pay. There are enough things out there that
make us pay for dubious return; I feel we should whole-heartedly
support those things which give us great value for the priced.

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Is it really The End?

Posted Aug 1, 2002 17:02 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

But there is such a thing as a free lunch, and most readers of LWN are using it: the Linux kernel, the GNU utilities, X, the Gnome and KDE stuff, etc (yes, most of the people doing this work have some arrangement that lets them get paid, but you, the reader of this message, are almost certainly not paying. Given that LWN covers free software, it would be hypocritical to make LWN completely subscription-only: the material would be gathered mainly by interviewing people who give away their work for free, after all.

However, the plan to delay access to non-subscribers for some time period is completely reasonable and I fully support it. This is very different from denying access to the LWN weekly edition to non-subscribers forever.

Is it really The End?

Posted Aug 2, 2002 8:55 UTC (Fri) by micro (guest, #3026) [Link]

True, it may be perceived to be hypocritical, but I don't believe that in actual fact it would be, but maybe that's just me.

Remember the FSF is about freedom not price. I don't see how people's freedom is limited by asking people to pay for such a service. As you rightly point out the material is (thankfully) already freely available to poeple if they want to search for it, indeed much of it would still be neatly presented on lwn.net in the daily news section. The service that we would be paying for is for someone to collate it and present it to us in such a way that it saves us time and is of interest.

People have a right to earn a living and make money. Indeed the GPL expressly allows people to make money out of free software, so long as they don't restrict the freedom of others in the process.

If LWN contained important documentation that was not available elsewhere I'd be more inclined to agree with you, but as it is, it's more like a newspaper reporting than anything else and I see nothing wrong with a subscription based system.