LWN status update

• Donations and new advertising since last Wednesday night now total a little over $20,000. We're generally not known for a shortage of words, but, when we try to express our surprise and our gratitude, words fail us. You folks are just amazing.

• We are seriously reconsidering the subscription approach, having revised our estimates of the money we could raise upward. There are various features that we could offer to subscribers without too much effort, and additional content which would take more effort. The crucial question with a subscription offering, though, is this: do we limit the Weekly Edition to subscribers? The exclusion of non-subscribers would last a few days at most; the content would eventually be freely available to all. We would rather not restrict the weekly content even for a few days, but such a restriction could make the difference between a successful subscription offering and a failure.

• It is still our sense that subscriptions alone may not suffice. If we could arrange a small base of (probably corporate) sponsorships, though, the situation would look a lot more solid. We have had no luck in finding this kind of sponsorship in the past, but we have had a number of new contacts over the last week. Some of these are impressively cynical attempts to use LWN for purposes that have little to do with free software, but others are serious. It will take time, of course, to see if any of these leads actually take us anywhere.

We will decide in the next day or two what our short-term plan will be after the August 1 LWN Weekly Edition is published. Stay tuned, and thanks again for your incredible support.

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