Re: Where has the pioneer spirit of LWN gone?

While I disagree with Thomas Wardman's letter on some points, I find I
must agree with his central analogy and point. LWN, it seemed to me when
I read that first short issue way back when, was being made for two
reasons: To do a little bit of indirect promoting for a small consulting
firm we'd never heard of called Eklektix Inc., and because the couple of
people who were putting it out had something important to contribute to
the linux community, and had the desire to do so. Between then and now
the focus changed so that LWN itself became the business that was
supposed to make the money. And then that began to look less and less
viable.

I belive that Thomas's suggestion that you try to farm out some parts of
LWN to volenteer third parties, and go back to working on LWN only,
well, 50% of the time, is feasable. For years I wrote Debian Weekly
News, and was happy to see LWN refine my already condensed summary of
what was happening in Debian, and satisfied to see you sometimes quote
whole sections as most of a week's Debian coverage. I would miss Jon's
writing about the kernel and editorials, but the summaries of basic
news, security, development etc, could be contributed by talented
volenteers.

Some of the extraneous bits could even be stripped out -- this week's
"mini-LWN" was still LWN, despite its relative brevity (though you
trimmed entirely the wrong sections this week. :-P).

Anyway, I can think of a dozen reasons why you probably don't want to
follow this suggestion; one reason is that it would mean probably 75% of
the company losing their jobs. But if the subscription service should
fail to live up to your hopes, and there is no other choice, I hope it
*will* be done -- I hope that you at LWN are still in this for what
Thomas terms the "pioneering spirit" of the original LWN.

In the meantime, best of luck with the subscription service! I for one
will continue to support LWN in any ways I can.

-- 
see shy jo