LWN.Net Celebrates Its 20th Birthday (lwn.net) 24
Free software/Linux news site LWN.net just celebrated its 20th birthday, with publisher Jonathan Corbet calling the last two decades "an amazing journey." LWN published the first edition of their weekly newsletter on January 22, 1998, and Corbet (who also contributes to the Linux kernel) writes today that "It has been quite a ride. We in the free-software community set out to change the world, and we succeeded beyond our wildest expectations."
Here's how he described their second edition the next week... We were arguably helped by the lead news in that edition: Netscape's decision to open-source its "Communicator" web browser. That quickly brought the world's attention to open-source software, though that term would not be invented for a few months yet, and to Linux in particular. LWN was a shadow of what it is now, but it was evidently good enough to ride on that wave and establish itself as a part of the Linux community.
Corbet reviews the highlights. ("Companies discovered our little hobbyist system and invested billions into it, massively accelerating development at all levels of the system...") But he also adds that "Through all of this, we also got to learn some lessons about successfully running a community information source on the net." For the last 16 years the site has supported itself with $7.00-a-month subscriptions, offering early access to their Weekly Edition plus subscriber-only mailing lists, "allowing our content to quickly become part of the community record."
Plus, through events around the world, "we have met -- and become friends with -- many of our readers and many people in the community as a whole. This community is an amazing group of people; it has been a honor and a joy to be a part of it..."
"The free-software community's work is not done, and neither is ours. "
Here's how he described their second edition the next week... We were arguably helped by the lead news in that edition: Netscape's decision to open-source its "Communicator" web browser. That quickly brought the world's attention to open-source software, though that term would not be invented for a few months yet, and to Linux in particular. LWN was a shadow of what it is now, but it was evidently good enough to ride on that wave and establish itself as a part of the Linux community.
Corbet reviews the highlights. ("Companies discovered our little hobbyist system and invested billions into it, massively accelerating development at all levels of the system...") But he also adds that "Through all of this, we also got to learn some lessons about successfully running a community information source on the net." For the last 16 years the site has supported itself with $7.00-a-month subscriptions, offering early access to their Weekly Edition plus subscriber-only mailing lists, "allowing our content to quickly become part of the community record."
Plus, through events around the world, "we have met -- and become friends with -- many of our readers and many people in the community as a whole. This community is an amazing group of people; it has been a honor and a joy to be a part of it..."
"The free-software community's work is not done, and neither is ours. "
Re:LWN was great for a while, then got greedy (Score:5, Informative)
Content is only paywalled for 1 week.
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I subscribed for a while, but as a largely non-contributing casual reader who doesn't need immediate Linux news, I actually found it better to read the articles a week later. This was because the readership seems knowledgeable and the comments after a week would be informative. So when my subscription lapsed, I didn't renew it.
What I enjoy about LWN is that it is very technical. I've never looked at a kernel source file, but reading the articles tests my memory of all those university lectures about cache c
Re:LWN was great for a while, then got greedy (Score:4, Informative)
I see nothing wrong with charging money for curating freely available facts. Anyone who values their time less are free to curate their own news feeds.
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Per se! Dammit, "per say" is my #1 pet peeve!
Empirical evidence proves you wrong. Nobody has come close to doing for free what LWN does. Sometimes, you get what you pay for, and with LWN you get quality technical journalism with no BS.
Re:LWN was great for a while, then got greedy (Score:5, Insightful)
This is nonsense. First, the "paywall" only lasts for one week, not a month, as someone else pointed out. Second, not *all* content is embargoed for one week. Third, once the content is out, it is under a permissive CC license.
Please, if you want to critizice something, check your facts instead of spewing fake news.
And USING CAPITAL LETTERS doesn't make alternative facts more true.
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Re: LWN was great for a while, then got greedy (Score:5, Insightful)
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Thanks for all the ping responses! (Score:3)
For almost 20 years I've been using "lwn.net" to ping-test my internet connection, just because it's easy and quick to type on the command line. It's probably been 15 years since I actually read anything on the site, but I just pinged them a few weeks ago.
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Webalizer (Score:2)
Been an avid Subscriber For Most of those 20 Years (Score:4, Insightful)
Congratulations! (Score:3)
As a fellow member of the community, coder, business owner...
Thanks for all you've done for these 2 decades. While other folks drifted off to do other things, and the community evolved to the mainstream it is today, LWN managed to retain its focus and continue to provide valuable content.
Hats off, and here's to the future of LWN.
Long time ago.. (Score:2)