Crowdfunded Linux Voice Magazine Releases Second Issue CC-BY-SA

M-Saunders writes: As covered previously on Slashdot, Linux Voice crowdfunded its way to success in late 2013, showing how a small team can make things happen with a different business model (giving profits and content back to the community). Now, a few months after the magazine made issue 1 freely available, they've released issue 2 under the Creative Commons for everyone to share and modify. If you've ever fancied making your own Raspberry Pi-powered arcade machine, there's a full guide in the second issue.

Shame it's not open source

[Half-pint HAL]

Sadly, despite all the criticism of the issue 1 release, they've stuck to their guns and released most of their articles as "object files" in PDF. To me, that feels like their being purposefully obstructive -- it is such a faff to extract text from a PDF file, and they must already have the article text in an editable format.

I hope we don't get an announcement for every single issue from now on in. Let's wait until there's some actual news before running another /. story....

Re:Shame it's not open source

[DaveAtWorkAnnoyingly]

There are so many holes with this post I'm going to have to only pick the top couple. This is of course, irrelevant if the post is sarcasm which I really hope it is. However, being British, I'm pretty good at identifying sarcasm. I can only assume therefore that the post was made by a particularly immature teenager or younger who hasn't get got a clue on how the world works.

Actually, I've changed my mind. Most of the readers of this will already be rolling their eyes, I'm not going to waste my time stating the obvious... The AC can come back and ask for more if he/she requires...

I'm going to go and continue breathing the free air I have, and drinking the water of which I pay for...

Re:Shame it's not open source

[MacTO]

Third parties can charge whatever you want for FLOSS software, including Linux, because that is not what they mean by free. The only restriction is that they cannot violate the terms of the license agreement. That means, among other things, that they cannot place restrictions upon duplication and distribution. In other words, Linux is usually gratis because there is no incentive to pay for it unless services are bundled with it (e.g. technical support or development).

Yet none of that is relevant because we are discussing a publication about Linux. Anyone is free to write about Linux, place restrictions upon the articles or books that they write, and charge whatever they please. That is because they are not distributing open source software (beyond excerpts of code and documentation) so the license agreements simply do not apply.

Re:

[sumdumass]

I think your 2 cents has suffered from inflation. I cannot tell if you are trolling or seriously think your old and outdated impresons of linux is worth anything at all. The names you mention are alnost ten years changed. It sort of like exclaiming that windows sucks because you had WindowsME installed.

Anyways, unless you are some die hard windows or Mac fanboy, i suggest you dust off a partition and look at a modern distro. Judging from the names you mentioned, i would advise staying away from a debian bas

Re:

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

I'm told they'll be doing .epub starting in issue 7.

Would you want it to be Open Source?

[Daniel Oom]

The point of having an Open Source publication would be that anybody will be allowed to change any article. We already have that, and it's called Wikipedia.

Re:

[Half-pint HAL]

Yes, but they made a point of licensing it as CC-BY-SA, not CC-ND, as though they're expecting derivative works... but then they put up a barrier to adaptation by publishing in a delivery format that is notorious for breaking even simple copy-and-paste operations.

Re:

[Dcnjoe60]

Sadly, despite all the criticism of the issue 1 release, they've stuck to their guns and released most of their articles as "object files" in PDF. To me, that feels like their being purposefully obstructive -- it is such a faff to extract text from a PDF file, and they must already have the article text in an editable format.

If you go to the download page, all the articles are available individually as PDF, but many also in text or html.

Re:

[M-Saunders]

Mike here from the Linux Voice team. As you can see, we've made many articles available also as plain text, or HTML. And you know what? These are extracted from the PDF. Many changes are made at the layout stage, so it's not like we just use the original plain text that's sent to us. We're looking at ways to improve this workflow, but be reasonable -- we wouldn't be "purposefully obstructive" as you so nicely put it. Why would we even do this in the first place, if so? Why even bother if we didn't want peop