Linux Journal Ceases Publication (betanews.com) 134
Not too long after Linus Torvalds wrote his own Unix kernel, which he called Linux, in the summer of 1991, a magazine was founded by enthusiasts to focus on the operating system. For nearly three decades Linux Journal has been an authority magazine on all things Linux, but it is now shuttering doors, it said late Wednesday. The announcement comes about two years after the periodical said it would cease to exist, but it was able to find some backing -- from Privacy Internet Access group -- to resume operations later on.
The team said on Wednesday that all staff members had been laid off and the company was left with no operating funds to continue in any capacity. It remains committed to keeping the website afloat for another few weeks.
The team said on Wednesday that all staff members had been laid off and the company was left with no operating funds to continue in any capacity. It remains committed to keeping the website afloat for another few weeks.
Where is the crowdfunding? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll chip in to keep the website up as a static archive indefinitely.
Better yet, I hope a museum, library, or someplace like the Internet Archive steps up to take on this responsibility. I'm not talking about just the "archive.org" link to history, but also the current domains, so existing links don't break.
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I don't really care if existing links break. I can always just search the URL in the archive. Or for links in my content, update them to archive.org links.
Re: Where is the crowdfunding? (Score:1)
Spend the money elsewhere.
What money?
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Better yet, I hope a museum, library, or someplace like the Internet Archive steps up to take on this responsibility.
Call up IBM . . . they just bought RedHat, so they have a big interest in promoting Linux . . . and they have a lot of money.
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How long before its renamed to IBM Linux? Which - unfortunately - would go down a lot better with the suits in the boardroom when they're getting the chequebook out.
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Don't you mean GNU/IBM Linux?
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Don't you mean GNU/IBM Linux?
Screw off. When you run The GIMP under Windows do you call it GNU/Windows?
What happened to GNU/Hurd?
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Huge numbers of 'suits' have been paying for RedHat for what, 20 years?
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You are not wrong. But how many who wouldn't pay for some toy names "Redhat" would be willing to buy an enterprise operating system for "Big Blue"? I'm talking about the C-levels.
How many of the ones already paying for Redhat do you think would pay more without a second thought now that it's "IBM"?
Re: Where is the crowdfunding? (Score:1)
WTF is the problem with branding a distribution?
Oracle Linux
Debian Linux
SUSE Linux
Ubuntu Linux
Etc.
Red a Hat Linux was owned by a publicly-traded company that was bought by another publicly-traded company, I would be surprised if they didn't rename it.
Where's the beef? (Score:1)
Maybe it died because open-source promotes the idea that one doesn't have to pay for things?
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Yeah, and that would also explain the struggles of all the other publications, like the LA Times, too right? It's all Open Source's fault. https://www.niemanlab.org/2019... [niemanlab.org]
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They're having the same problem that M$ and others had in the server space. They're trying to charge for something others are doing better, for free.
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This has always been the problem with topical / hobby magazines. One can debate the exact periodicity, but they all get repetitive after some length of time - when I used to subscribe to gardening magazines, it seemed 2-3 years was the period. Not only are there a finite number of broadly interesting topics to write about, but they also have to factor in subscriber turnover... someone who just signed up a few months ago may want to see new articles about a topic the magazine last covered more than a year ag
Re:Where is the crowdfunding? (Score:5, Informative)
https://archive.org/details/linuxjournalmagazine [archive.org]
Re:Where is the crowdfunding? (Score:5, Interesting)
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine [archive.org]
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Compute! Magazine https://archive.org/details/compute-magazine/ [archive.org]
My favorite part (Score:1)
Views for my videos dropped off sharply as newer videos about the shooting dominated the search result pages for the Gilroy Garlic Festival. The new videos were the same clips shown on Twitter, mainstream media news reports, and every crackpot offering their conspiracy theory. If I had made a follow-up video to talk about the shooting, it would have disappeared in the noise or sidelined by the YouTube algorithm.
On Saturday, July 27, 2019, my friend and I drove down to Gilroy on the 101.
What the hell chris. This doesn't make you look like a nice guy. YOUTUBE VIEWS DROPPING. MUST PROVIDE COVERAGE OF SHOOTING. I know you don't get it because you're autistic or something and it's hard for you. Maybe you should ask your friends how it looks? Or if you were personally curious at least have someone check your writing for the sensitivity that doesn't come so easy to you.
Look what happened to that kid who went to the suicide forest. If you're ever popular people will find reasons to tear
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Where are all the "IT Idealism ain't dead" people now?
They're dead, duh!
Why? (Score:3)
Why crowdfund something like this unless there's a leadership change that answers to the crowdfunders? You'll just get the same results, only losing YOUR money this time.
As someone else pointed out, when was the last time we went to Linux Journal to actually read anything current?
I was a subscriber for years. I still have some paper issues from back in the day. When they rang their first death knell a couple of years ago, I copied their whole archive to a DVD. Because even when they got a reprieve, I figure
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Reading the announcement on their site, they did try to change things.
But it didn't pan out.
It's always hard to re-invent yourself and experiment, when you're low on funds, so I'm not surprised.
Re: Where is the crowdfunding? (Score:2)
If there is a demand for the archived content, it should be able to be completely funded from as revenue.
Ad revenue is small, but simply hosting a website is very inexpensive.
Personally, I suspect the content will not age well, and sooner than we suspect the site will become irrelevant - how many 20 year-old articles on Linux are still relevant today?
No point crying over it (Score:4, Insightful)
Its gone bust because no one - ie you lot - wanted to pay for it. I actually prefer reading technical articles on paper rather than slowly getting a headache reading from a screen, but I seem to be in an increasingly shrinking minority.
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Printing out loads of articles seems like a good idea until you realise how much A4+toner/ink costs. And when you're done the quality isn't as good as professionally printed publications anyway.
Re:No point crying over it (Score:5, Interesting)
As someone who bought it for several years, I lost interest due to several reasons
Newer users aren't entering the field at a fast enough rate to sustain an entry-level magazine. More experienced users have a collection of O'Reilly books to fall back on for the various areas of interest, so it just wasn't possible to justify spending more money on what became an increasingly tedious slog of entry level articles.
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"Newer users aren't entering the field at a fast enough rate to sustain an entry-level magazin"
Simply not true. In the UK at least there are 4 seperate linux magazines published.
Re: No point crying over it (Score:1)
It wasn't worth paying for after your first 12 issues - the topics were re-hashes of previous re-hashes of previous articles.
I watch with curiosity the Raspberry Pi magazine MagPi - it is underwritten by RPi foundation, and is available in print and for free download. I like to download the PDF and flip through new issues.
Re:No point crying over it (Score:4)
Do you still use one of those archaic vacuum glass enclosures that displayed text, produced by firing a electrical beam at phosphor coated glass? If then, I can understand the headache references.
Unfortunately, for Linux Journal if you want to be competitive you have to bring something new and up to date each month. The few times that I read LJ on paper I found the articles to be months out of date. In a world full of websites, print is dead.
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The Buggy Whip makers are gone because no one, -ie you lot- wanted to buy buggy whips anymore. I actually prefer using a buggy whip on my horseless carriage because it gives me a sense of satisfaction that there might actually BE horses under the bonnet.
Print is another outlier in the race of progress. I too like to read physical paper articles (who takes an iPad to the crapper?), but like the rest of this thread said, the print articles suffered from bit rot. :)
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Its gone bust because no one - ie you lot - wanted to pay for it. I actually prefer reading technical articles on paper rather than slowly getting a headache reading from a screen, but I seem to be in an increasingly shrinking minority.
I've subscribed to it since the mid-nineties. Granted, I haven't read it for a couple of years but I've still been a paying subscriber. Some of the in-depth articles and interviews were quite good.
The last couple of years, the subscription did give you a digital download rather than a physical magazine though.
.
Re: No point crying over it (Score:2)
I *really* wish I could buy an eInk-based reader with the following attributes:
* Two displays, side by side (connected by hinge), each with:
* 3:4 aspect ratio (give or take), at least as big as pages in a typical present-day computer book. Ideally, a second version with pages the size of Wired magazine, or British computer magazines.
* min. 200PPI (4-bit grayscale), 400PPI (2-bit grayscale), or 600PPI (1-bit grayscale)
* ability to do at least 1-bit red at 200ppi or 2-bit red at 100ppi (though ideally, matchi
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I agree, but I would guess the market is too small to offer such a thing at a reasonable price.
It would probably put you well beyond iPad Pro territory as that still has a sizeable market, and thus lower overhead costs.
Just a stand for such a device might be $999. ;-)
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For the time being, my thoughts are that the best platform we're likely to have for ebook reading is probably going to be a PAIR of 3:4 aspect-ratio tablets, mounted in a book-like carrier side by side (each displaying one of two pages). But even then, the pickings are pretty slim, just because pdf-rendering and file i/o on most Android platforms sucks so badly (and the few platforms where it DOESN'T completely suck are really hard to pick out and identify, because it's rarely/never advertised as an actual
Light filters (Score:2)
Have you tried the (blue?) light filters when reading off screens? I set it on my phone one time to kick off at night, and liked it so much that my work/home PCs are like it 24/7 (moot if you're a graphic artist, but I'm not), and I can feel a noticeable difference. I'm a bit younger, but certainly starting to deteriorate.
Hope this helps.
ROFLMAO (Score:3, Insightful)
I told my bosses about Linux 20 years ago and they wouldn't buy into it due to ownership when $h1t hit the fan so we stayed with Sun and IBM.
Obviously the cost has been the motivator for the 'cloud' instead of having iron in house.
Yes, Linux people are cheap and they pay their support a fraction of what they did 20 years ago.
Re:ROFLMAO (Score:5, Insightful)
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Which brings us back to why Linux Journal is struggling. The Linux community in general wants "free as in beer, not free as in speech".
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I'd say the "internet community" in general wants "free as in beer." The monetization of the Internet needs more patreon-esque funding rather than the traditional "buy the lot" stuff. The Internet has made it possible to consume things in bite-sized portions, and as such, the old way of charging for things is becoming obsolete. I am probably not representative of the majority of internet users, but I pay for content I like, and don't for the content I dislike (but I don't continue to frequent the content I
Re:ROFLMAO (Score:5, Insightful)
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Kylix did use some Wine, but mostly Qt, IIRC.
Not about Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
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Then they stopped publishing MAD MAGAZINE - that's gotta hurt!
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Agreed. The author goes so far as to draw this absurd conclusion:
While I am sure the now-former employees at the magazine have many theories of why they are going out of business, the likely truth is, you can't depend on Linux users paying actual money on a magazine. Hell, they'd rather debate which distro is better for free on Reddit.
Again, there is nothing wrong with that, but if the success of your business is contingent on Linux users spending money, you are playing with fire. The exception to this is companies that sell hardware to run Linux-based operating systems, such as System76, as even the cheapest Linux user can't download a computer for free.
We just heard about MSDN magazine shutting down after 33 years. Buggy whip manufacturers are going out of business. It's sad for the people affected by this, but it's really not practical to perpetually prop up evolutionary dead ends.
Mission accomplished, Mr. Petreley ! (Score:4, Interesting)
I was a long-time subscriber to the Liinux Journal and I remember when around 2003 Nick Petreley took over the journal.
He changed the physical layout of the print version and drove away many of the long-term contributors only to give a lot of column space to his friennds.
He did everything he could to harm the journal.
I naturally cancelled my subscription.
After a while he got booted out and the journal came back to the old format, and brought back the old contributors, but it never recoved the readership.
It is not a shame, it is disaster.
LJ is/was by far the best publication in the field. Other like Maximum Linux or Linux Format are/were nowhere near as good.
"It is not a shame, it is disaster" (Score:5, Interesting)
Eh, some of it was editorial mistakes, but some of it was simply the changing environment, and the maturity of Linux itself. Back when Linux was this hot up and coming threat to Microsoft's dominance (Promise was in the air!), it was seen as this cool cutting edge thing to be involved in. Linus Torvalds used to say that he wanted nothing less than total Linux dominance. Well, he almost got it. Linux is in everything from servers to smart phones. Linux powers the vast majority of cloud infrastructure. It dominates server rooms. The only place it HASN'T won, and likely never will, is the desktop. Linux stopped being "Revolution OS", and has become, for all intents and purposes, just more commodity code. Linux went from being the radical revolutionary that wore his hair long and sported Rage Against The Machine t-shirts, to that guy wearing a polo and khakis that watches his cholesterol. For goodness sake, Red Hat, the premier Linux company, was just bought by who? IBM. The very picture of stiff, blue-suited business culture. Linux User Groups have either shrank or disappeared outright in some places, just like the computer clubs of old came and went when computers became part of the everyday landscape.
In other words, Linux has become so common that it's... boring.
Boring doesn't make movements. Boring doesn't feed rabid fanboys. Boring doesn't sell magazines.
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Boring doesn't make movements. Boring doesn't feed rabid fanboys. Boring doesn't sell magazines.
2019, the year of...BSD!
Netcraft confirms it. Linux Journal is dead.
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Linux is now the thing to beat just as windows once was.
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The fact that it took 16 years for it to die is not as relevant as the way it lived those 16 years. As a much weaker publication that it has been before Mr. Petreley took over.
Also, call me a conspiracy theorist if you want, but wasn't 2003 the year that SCO started its attack on Linux ? The year that the city of Munich announced its very publicized Linux migration ? And, yes, 2004 was the the first time we heard of the "Year of the Linux Desktop".
The timing made me suspicious back in 2003 and just that 16
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The fact that it took 16 years for it to die is not as relevant as the way it lived those 16 years. As a much weaker publication that it has been before Mr. Petreley took over. Also, call me a conspiracy theorist if you want, but wasn't 2003 the year that SCO started its attack on Linux ? The year that the city of Munich announced its very publicized Linux migration ? And, yes, 2004 was the the first time we heard of the "Year of the Linux Desktop". The timing made me suspicious back in 2003 and just that 16 years have passed it does not make it less suspicious.
Yes, 2003 was the year SCO had completely given up on Caldera [wikipedia.org] and sued IBM [wikipedia.org].
While in ostalgia mode - a joke I heard while working as a developer at Red Hat, while Caldera was still a competitor. Caldera was trying to market their distribution with some version of why it was better to use their compiled binaries rather than someone else, so we made a slogan for them: "Caldera - better bytes. More ones, less zeroes.".
Apparently it's not the Year of Linux (Score:3)
Just when this could have been (Score:3, Funny)
the year of Linux on the coffee table
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the year of Linux on the coffee table
The year of Linux Journal disappearing from the recycling bin.
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Now that your coffee table actually runs Linux. :)
Sad, but honestly... (Score:4, Interesting)
When was the last time you actually READ anything at linuxjournal.com? I can't remember. Nowadays, it seems that all of my Linux related reading is one of the following sites:
Slashdot: To learn about the latest Linux security issues, and the latest Linux kernel drama that Linus has caused this week.
Access.redhat.com: To figure out how to fix shit that's broken in RHEL
Stackoverflow: To figure out how to fix shit that's broken in RHEL when access.redhat.com didn't have a valid answer.
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My preferred Linux news sites:
https://www.linuxtoday.com/ [linuxtoday.com]
https://www.linuxjournal.com/n... [linuxjournal.com]
http://lxer.com/ [lxer.com]
https://lwn.net/Archives/ [lwn.net]
https://fedoramagazine.org/ [fedoramagazine.org]
http://www.linux-magazine.com/... [linux-magazine.com]
https://www.alltop.com/linux [alltop.com]
https://old.reddit.com/r/linux... [reddit.com]
Anyone want back issues? (Score:3)
I have about 100 back issues (circa 1998-2006?) sitting in a box I was going to recycle, complete with attached CDs/DVDs etc...
I'm willing to pay to ship 'em somewhere if anyone wants 'em
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sad news (Score:2)
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Re: Most just want free stuff (Score:1)
PC Mag served a market (Windows) nearly 20x the size of the Linux market, and it ceased publication years ago - it's not surprising that Linux Journal ceased publication.
Fond Memories (Score:2)
Bummer! (Score:1)
Can we please get an ACTUAL new story? (Score:2)
The linked article is pure garbage, which is evident from the first sentence to the last.
Linux is used more than ever, I just don't get the constant swipes at Linux users in this trash-piece.
Slashdot just gets more and more disappointing.
Long format articles (Score:3)
The thing that I liked best about Linux Journal was that they would take the time to do longer, more in depth articles than you generally find on the web. I'll admit that of late, I haven't really been reading through every issue cover to cover like I used to just because I don't really have the time for it.
However, it was still worthwhile to me for those articles that I was interested in, because it wasn't clickbait crap ehere you had 3 paragraphs of text surrounded by ads, where you have to continually click for the next 2-3 paragraphs.
I've also learned some nifty things about shell scripting over the years.
I'm sad to see Linux Journal go away, but realize that publishing a magazine these days is pretty freaking difficult given the attention span of so many folks, myself occasionally included.
Deja-Vu all over again (Score:1)
Kyle signed off last time with "So long and thanks for all the Bash", so this time could be the other victim of the maximum improbability drive, "Oh no. Not again!"
Where is the sustainability in running trade mags? (Score:1)
I'd say there's a fair amount of oversight missing from this business. Linux is installed on millions of servers and devices and we can't even have a decent trade magazine devoted to exploring this concept because of cost overruns at a corporate board?
Is someone at LJ mismanaging money? Who fucked this up? Isn't this the second time in about ten years that they've run out of money?
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Your words are strange to me. (Score:2)
What is this "magazine" of which you speak?
it's hard (Score:2)
it's hard being a magazine these days.
none of the ones i read are still around.
i am to blame for this as well, when you can get all the information you want online in an instant, i just stopped buying magazines.
Linux Journal Mirror (Score:1)
Sad to see them go (Score:2)
LJ published my only paid article, ever. Paid me $200! I thought it was great.