[linux-elitists] Linux Journal, April 1994 - November 2017

[Rick Moen]

http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/linux-journal-ceases-publication

Linux Journal Ceases Publication
Dec 01, 2017 By Carlie Fairchild

EOF

It looks like we’re at the end, folks. If all goes according to a plan
we’d rather not have, the November issue of Linux Journal was our last.
The simple fact is that we’ve run out of money, and options along with
it. We never had a wealthy corporate parent or deep pockets of our own,
and that made us an anomaly among publishers, from start to finish.
While we got to be good at flying close to the ground for a long time,
we lost what little elevation we had in November, when the scale finally
tipped irrevocably to the negative.

While we see a future like publishing’s past—a time when advertisers
sponsor a publication because they value its brand and readers—the
advertising world we have today would rather chase eyeballs, preferably
by planting tracking beacons in readers' browsers and zapping them with
ads anywhere those readers show up. But that future isn’t here, and the
past is long gone.

There is some hope, we suppose, that a savior might come through; but it
will have to be one willing to pick up some of our debt, in addition to
our brand, our archive, our domains and our subscribers and readers. If
you know anyone who can make a serious offer, let us know. Otherwise,
watch LinuxJournal.com and hope that at least our legacy archives (which
go back to Linux Journal’s birth in April 1994, when Linux hit 1.0)
won’t go away. There’s a lot of great stuff here, and a lot of history
we’d hate the world to lose.
[...]

Columnist Kyle Rankin also has a valedictory column, here:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/so-long-and-thanks-all-bash

I'm not clear if there i$ a place to $end gesture$ of appreciation.
--
Cheers, Welcome to our special issue on violence in the
Rick Moen workplace..., I mean system administration.
***@linuxmafia.com -- Don Marti, Linux Journal, Dec. 2000
McQ! (4x80)
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[Andy Bennett]

Hi peeps,

Post by Rick Moen
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/linux-journal-ceases-publication
Linux Journal Ceases Publication
Dec 01, 2017 By Carlie Fairchild
EOF

Thanks Rick! That's really sad to hear.

Post by Rick Moen
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/so-long-and-thanks-all-bash

-----
We've won on so many fronts, but we've also lost our way. It would have
been unthinkable and scandalous even a decade ago for a presenter at a
Linux conference to use Powerpoint on Windows, but you only have to count
the Macbooks at a modern Linux conferences (even among the presenters!) to
see how many in the community have lost the very passion for and principles
around Open Source software that drove Linux's success.
-----

That really succinctly sums up how I've been feeling about the Linux
community for the last 8 or 10 years. By 2007 we were doing so well on all
the platforms. Even I'd moved from my IRIX and Windows desktops to Linux.

There were usable Open Source alternatives for almost everything you could
need and even games were starting to be a thing!


Then the smartphone revolution happened and we completely lost our way. In
many ways I feel similar to how things were in the early '90s; let alone
the late '90s when ESR was writing his essays about how to change the
economics of it all.

These days it's taken as a given that proprietary apps on the most popular
platforms are the only option. People don't design protocols and build UIs
on top of them anymore: they build monolithic, proprietary, architectures
for niche use cases, none of which overlap or work together in a meaningful
way. Data is locked in to whichever app wrote it out to the file^W cloud.
...and good luck trying to get your hands on the actual underlying file at
all.


Of course, I feel bad. I blame myself. I was just a young whippersnapper
when I discovered Linux in the mid '90s. All the contributors were older,
cleverer people than me. I assumed that I'd take my place amongst them
eventually. ...but I didn't (and still don't) contribute enough. I fought
for Open Source at work and I coached company lawyers on the intricacies of
the GPL, but I never had a big project that I cared about with a community
around it.


I work in a pretty forward thinking place right now. People talk about Open
Source a lot and we're encouraged (strongly) to Open Source everything we
do. ...and it does actually happen for pretty much everything. ...but
people don't know what it means. They fetishise Amazon and their
proprietary products without the hindsight of having lived thru' the MS and
IBM monopolies before them. They think that if it's a "microservice in the
cloud" then it's "reusable" and, of course, they all have Macbooks of one
form or another.

They're not your sterotypical brogrammers either; it's the most diverse
place I've ever worked. It's multidisciplinary in a big way and, as a man,
I'm often (almost always) in the minority (by a small margin) in meetings:
and we've got nearly 800 people. However, the approach to software is one
that I recognise from the brogrammer ethos: use Open Source but don't
really understand or value what it is, why it's important, how it was built
or how to build your own things in that powerful, generic and reusable way.
Hack away until you've covered the narrow scope of a particular "story" but
don't look for any simplifying abstractions that might give you more than
that.



What to do?

The arrogance that got us from "underdog" to where we needed to be is not
appropriate anymore but, somehow, we need a strong vision with strong,
opinionated leadership; someone who can hold standards; technical, moral
and philosophical, high whilst still being liked by the many.


A few years ago I thought we had a narrow window to reclaim the handheld
ecosystem. I thought that colour e-ink would be our opportunity to be able
to make a fully open platform. The battery requirements would not be
onerous and the graphics engine couldn't be expected to have amazing 3D
rendering capabilities. It could be made from off-the-shelf components and
realistically compete with any custom platform from a big manufacturer.

It seems that colour e-ink has been longer coming than I anticipated.
Perhaps that's a good thing because I don't know of any projects seriously
looking to do something like that since OpenMoko. Maybe we'll have our day
again but it's not clear that there's the community in place to compete
with, say, somthing like CityMapper either on the technical front or the
political one.

Open Data that would power such a thing is still in its infancy. Perhaps
that's where we start?





Regards,
@ndy

[Don Marti]

Post by Rick Moen
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/linux-journal-ceases-publication
Linux Journal Ceases Publication
Dec 01, 2017 By Carlie Fairchild

Final parasite load: 40
https://blog.zgp.org/purple-box-claims-another-victim/