An LWN status update

An LWN status update

Hmmm. Here's an idea which might not be feasible for various reasons, but it can't hurt to mention it...

What if we could (when subscribing, or maybe at any time) put extra money into a pot to get specific articles written? So maybe I login, and there's a list made by LWN editors of stuff they could do but weren't necessarily planning for any time very soon. e.g. "Grumpy Editor on VOIP" and I can pay for one or more $10 "votes" to influence what gets written. LWN sets a threshold (I'm guessing this would be in the ballpark of $1000) and when it triggers, those votes vanish and the article gets written. If your $10 vote sits around lonely in an unwanted item (e.g. you turn out to the be one of only three people who wants an editorial on "Why Emacs is better than vi") you could be permitted to move it to something else.

Then I'd guess I expect the article to be locked to subscribers, plus voters if you decided to allow non-subscriber voters, and you'd maybe email all the voters to tell them "You got your wish! Check out the article here"

Anyway, this seems as though it could expand LWN and importantly it would make the expansion proportional to funding, because I know a lot of companies have great plans that go askew only because they guessed wrongly about expansion (either thinking too small and drowning or too big and spending too much too soon).

Oh, and I suppose companies might be interested in putting a lot more than $10 to get something highlighted. I don't know if LWN's principles would be bent too far by Foo Linux Inc. giving them $5000 to write an article about something that Foo Linux happens to be really good at...