Linux Journal Is Back | Hacker News Reader

Linux Journal Is Back

linuxjournal.com

706 pointsjlpcsl93 comments

Random anecdote: someone told me a bunch of years ago that LJ was looking for guest authors. So I submitted a couple of articles to them and they published them. This is when I found out that they were paying $400/article. Mind you, I sent them my stuff with absolutely no expectation of compensation. I was just happy to share what I knew and it was kinda cool to see my name in LJ. But hey if you promise money, I’ll take it. They struggled to pay me for like almost a year and eventually did by putting it on a company credit card, which was apparently the only way they could pay anyone because the other accounts were either frozen or off limits or some such. They folded shortly after this. So to every reader out there who was disappointed by them folding, I am sorry I contributed to that.

I am glad to see them try again, though I don’t know how this will work. This content is just a lot less relevant today than it was two decades ago.

To add my own similar anecdote, they mailed me a check (overseas, I might add). I didn't cash it, as it seemed like LJ needed the money.

I am likewise glad to see another try, but hopefully it won't try to emulate a generic tech/Linux blog. They had a niche for deep dives and original content, but I wonder how viable that really is in 2020.

> I didn't cash it, as it seemed like LJ needed the money.

I don't think this is particularly useful. For professional accounting purposes, uncashed outgoing checks are liabilities, meaning that in general, the company cannot spend that money to do other things. If you want them to keep the money, you need to tell them that. Otherwise, the money effectively gets split between the bank and the government.

I think this is more generally true - the existence of the check has no bearing on the liability; it's only when you cash it that liability is resolved (i.e. it's the bank transaction that resolves things, not the check)

> For professional accounting purposes, uncashed outgoing checks are liabilities

Even accounts payable that haven't had checks written against them yet are liabilities. Which makes your advice that you need to tell them if you want them to keep the money even more important.

Important to know that in many US jurisdictions, uncashed checks eventually "escheat" to the state as unclaimed property. (I was unaware of this until looking up accounting procedures for uncashed checks.)

This was an excellent Planet Money episode about how a guy bought AMZN stock to hold but it got escheated because he didn’t log into his brokerage account. Needless to say, what should’ve been a small fortune… wasn’t.

https://www.npr.org/2020/01/24/799345159/episode-967-escheat...

> They had a niche for deep dives and original content, but I wonder how viable that really is in 2020.

LWN.net seems to have excellent in depth original content; they get linked here occasionally. Perhaps that's an indication that that sort of thing is still viable. Hopefully they stay around for a long time yet.

Pro-tip: if you work for one of the Big Tech companies there may be a spreadsheet somewhere where you add your email and get LWN access, which I assume also increases the amount of money they get paid.

We (LWN) pay for articles too, and we don't even need to use our credit card :) If you would like to write for a highly technical and engaged audience, we'd love to hear from you; see https://lwn.net/op/AuthorGuide.lwn for more information.

Hypothetically: If they would give you money after submitting the article, but you had to fill a small form. Would you submit it?

Yes totally. I mean I essentially did by sending them the topics. I will say that their quality controls seemed really good. They talked me through the topics I had ideas for and definitely wanted a deep dive into both topics while making them very newbie friendly. But I guess not a ton of money in that.

I always took the author money for articles I wrote for them in trade for extending my subscription.

I loved Linux Journal, Linux Magazine and I loved CUJ and a couple of other Mexican tech magazines I used to purchase when I was young.

I Miss curated quality "push" information with substance. For me, the internet has brought really good "pull" information and put it at my fingertips, but I always enjoyed to get to know about some subject that I was not looking for, and was even not related to what I was looking for.

Nowadays, I use a combination of Feedly, HackerNews, Slashdot OSNews and others to try to get some interesting articles, but 90% of it is low quality SEO blurbs and a lot of it is repetitive.

Let's hope that Linux Journal returns with the same quality it had before.

Funny side story: Back in the mid 1990s I couldn't get Linux Magazine in my town in Mexico, but I had a cousin in Alaska. I subscribed and gave her address, and every 6 months or so she will travel to Mexico and give me batches of the magazines. It was a great time when I got to catch up on the great stuff in that magazine.

>I loved Linux Journal, Linux Magazine and I loved CUJ

Also DDJ, Byte (before got too commercial, aka ads over 70% of content), Unix Review, PC Magazine), etc. Even JavaWorld, etc., some time later, were good for a while.

> Also DDJ, Byte (before got too commercial, aka ads over 70% of content)

Wasn't this just how even good magazines were back then? I frequently read old scans of Byte magazine (they're all on archive.org), and while the technical content is really good, the ads probably take up 70% of the page count. I don't mind, since the the ads are themselves an interesting slice-of-life from the early days of microcomputers.

One key difference is that print ads don't dance around the page, expand to cover it up, play audio, use fake user interface widgets to get you to click them, or track you as you read.

For some time it may have been less than 70. But your point stands. I too liked reading many of the product ads. Got to learn of new genres and features. And there might have been more innovation in those days (both hardware and software),even if not all of it earth-shaking, as opposed to a lot of copycat and fluffy stuff these days (not all, of course).

Shout out to Creative Computing too.

I miss the thrill of visiting the local news stand and purchasing my favourite computer magazines. The internet has diminished some of that excitement with its always-available / quick-consumption model. Quality content is worth paying for but I would like to see publishers accept payment in smaller increments, as opposed to the current model of "we'll bill you $100 per year".

But Linux Magazine still exists? I ended up with a subscription to it when Linux Voice closed and got folded into it. I get a copy once a month in the mail.

EDIT: Ah, it seems it's called "Linux Pro Magazine" in the US. Maybe a different "Linux Magazine" you got?

Wow. I guess there is some good news in 2020, after all!

I wrote a monthly column for LJ for 20 years (!), and loved it, both as an author and as a reader. (I also loved hearing from people around the world who read it. Many of the subscribers to my "Better developers" weekly newsletter about Python tell me that they used to read my columns.)

Linux Journal died twice in the last few years, and when it closed in the summer of 2019, we were sure that this was the end.

Then I got e-mail from someone a few weeks ago, asking if I knew anything about Slashdot buying LJ. I had no idea, and asked a few other LJ alumni on Twitter what they knew, which was nothing. The info was on Slashdot's site, but there weren't any other details other than the mention of a purchase.

Let's hope that it works out this time around. I wish the best of success to Slashdot, the new Linux Journal, and the readership.

and i hope you'll get back to writing for them

The first comment says alot: "welcome back, you have been missed. You can probably ditch the "share on Google+" widget..."

Not sure entirely what niche they are aiming for. I don't think there is space in todays media environment for something in between superb depth (LWN) or breadth (Phoronix).

I think it's for a more leisurely read. Not everybody consumes technical updates in such depth as those websites offer.

There are plenty of Linux online magazines, not just those two, and they do just fine. It's never a bad thing to have more Linux-related content, different opinions, and to see things from new angles.

Trolling for dollar dollar bills, just like slashdot does.

I'm curious too. Of the "old" sites LWN is the only one I keep reading.

I just reached a point where I stopped caring about slashdot, kuroshin, linuxjournal, the register, and similar sites.

The only "old" site I still miss is freshmeat, I guess these days software discovering is achieved via github, but I have recurring thoughts that some curation of "20 new releases" and "10 new projects" might be interesting. Of course as soon as I think that I realize that people who follow node, golang, python, and similar niches would have no interest in other software so the dream dies.

Advogato is another site I wish still existed, but my involvement there was only sporadic, at best.

The coolgithubprojects subreddit gives me my periodic freshmeat releases list hit: https://pay.reddit.com/r/coolgithubprojects/

You can even put it in your RSS reader via https://pay.reddit.com/r/coolgithubprojects/.rss

The announcement kind of makes it sound like Slashdot Media brought back the "brand," but none of the editing staff or regular contributors.

I was about to mention this. Here I was hoping for a "supporting" post but was met with a "we bought it" post.

Linux Journal did end its activities late last year so it's not surprising that they couldn't simply bring everyone back. In fact, I hope the people who got laid off found new jobs a long time ago.

Reuven Lerner was among the great reads.

https://lerner.co.il/

Thanks so much! I really appreciate it.

And I'm surprised and delighted!

I learned Perl and mod_perl from your articles on LJ and at the time they really helped me level up in my career! Thanks!

Same here. I enjoyed your column and Marcel Gagné's.

Reuven's column always had neat tricks about Perl.

2020 is the year of Linux Journal on the newsstand!

I miss the days of an actual printed journal you could buy on a newsstand. Microsoft Systems Journal was a really good one at one point! (and a special shout out to Byte Magazine, not that it's a journal).

Somehow reading online articles isn't the same.

I completely agree.

I understand the economics and problems with print, but nothing beats getting a printed magazine in the newspaper every so often.

I still get the daily newspaper on paper for that reason, along with the Economist, New Yorker, and Atlantic. I might be a dinosaur, but I'm a happy dinosaur.

A decade and a half ago, I signed up for a 10 week trial of the SF Chronicle, fancying myself as someone would get up early and peruse the news in the morning, in this romantic vision of days gone by.

Every morning I opened the front door to leave for work and had to kick yet another bundled up newspaper into the corner of the entryway.

Finally, after 6 weeks or so, I had to call and tell them no, I don't need a refund, just cancel. It felt SO bad to basically say the newspaper had a negative value to me.

I kept a few magazines going for some time, but finally had to cancel them a few years ago as well. I just feel too bad about the waste, and that's worse than the value I get from fancying myself a reader.

And OSR’s The NT Insider which for some reason was delivered around the world for free and contained a ton of useful information.

Credit to this group. I've had a SourceForge address in place for 20yrs or so that forwards to my main email and it kept working through after their acquisition in 2016 of Sourceforge.

That's a nice announcement to see. How are Sourceforge and Slashdot these days? It's cool to see this umbrella opening up. Have the dynamics changed for SF and /. since the purchase? I interact with Sourceforge for downloads a few times a month, but I don't spend much time there otherwise.

Alas, Slashdot has lost my interest. It was more meaty back in the day. Or maybe it's I am changing.. IDK.

CmdrTaco FTW!

Typo! I think you mean Cowboy Neal! ;-)

You must be new here.

I, for one, welcome our Y Combinator overlords.

...but only in Soviet Russia, you insensitive clod!

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these comments.

No pics. Less title space than on reddit. Lame.

Natalie Portman, Hot Grits, Beowulf clusters.

It's not just you.

I've been reading since the end of last century, and I still go there regularly. It used to be the case that every day there were at least a few posts interesting posts there, that I hadn't yet read somewhere else. It kinda was my portal in the world of technology news. That's not the case anymore: the posts now are mostly not interesting (to me, at least), and mostly not exactly news anymore.

What I used to value about Slashdot were mostly the comments (much like here on Hacker News). Yes, there was lots of spam, but when reading on level 2 or 3 much of the comments did add value to the story. These days the comments have decreased very significantly, both in quantity and quality.

Slashdot really used to be much more meaty, as you say. These days I get my tech news from Ars Technica, Hacker News, LWN, and some Reddit subs.

I can't remember the last time I downloaded from Sourceforge. I wouldn't ever trust them again unless they basically started from scratch and were ran by completely different people.

I can. The UX is as crappy as ever.

I didn't understand, at the time of its last major refresh which was a fair while ago now, how SourceForge could be so resource intensive — all it needed to do was show links to download files. That was it.

Instead, it was packed to the rafters with Flash ads; the layout was bloated with unnecessarily large, unoptimised graphic files; and, the most prominent button to download didn't actually do that — it would take you to a page where you could select a server to download. That's your job, SourceForge, not mine.

I think that design comes from another era. All I've seen happen to it since is cutting out some of the graphics, changing the colour scheme a little, and switching to HTML ads. It's still from another era.

Unfortunately the era of bloated ads and unoptimized graphics never passed.

Unfortunately, it looks a bit like a shady warez site and I do find it somewhat non-intuitive (at least compared to github).

I think maybe the last part is true, but maybe not the first part.

is there any project of note still using sourceforge?

Veracrypt I believe

KeePass

Sourceforge and Slashdot were bought out 4 years ago: https://sourceforge.net/blog/sourceforge-acquisition-and-fut... - to my knowledge they've not done anything shady since.

I stopped reading slashdot after they got rid of the Bill Gates borg pic. I feel that was the moment it lost its soul. I’ve been on Hacker News since.

I think that’s why the sentence immediately after the one including “we own and operate Slashdot and SourceForge” says “We didn't always own SourceForge, but we acquired it in 2016, and [immediately began improving](https://www.pcworld.com/article/3032490/new-sourceforge-owne...), and have since [come a long way](https://sourceforge.net/blog/brief-history-sourceforge-look-...) in restoring and growing one of the most important resources in open source.” (links reformatted)

> ... unless they basically started from scratch and were ran by completely different people.

I would recommend that you "revisit" TFA, click the last one or two links in it, and read TFAs that those links take you to.

It seems to still work. I haven't really been a user since 2012 (although I just checked and my password from then still works..) Right now it seems to have similar stories to here.

Though if you scroll to the bottom you see the click bait type ads prevalent to the modern web

Slashdot comments are still pretty good, better than HN if you have the stomach for it.

Linux Journal is for extremists.

~XKeyScore~

https://www.theregister.com/2014/07/03/nsa_xkeyscore_stasi_s...

This comment may read as inflammatory, but is referring to the inclusion of Linux Journal in an alleged configuration file.

I'm glad that Linux Journal is back. However, I hope that they are back with a business model that is sustainable. Some of the most iconic magazines (e.g. MAD) couldn't make it with their traditional business model.

> Some of the most iconic magazines (e.g. MAD) couldn't make it with their traditional business model.

I didn't know that, and you just made me very, very sad. :/

Wow!!! Long life LJ!

> As Linux enthusiasts and long-time fans of Linux Journal, we were disappointed to hear about Linux Journal closing it's doors last year.

closing its doors, no apostrophe.

I take this to mean the editors weren't hired back? Refer to the closing message for proper grammar [1]:

> On August 7, 2019, Linux Journal shut its doors for good.

[1] https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/linux-journal-ceases-pu...

I really liked these guys!

Many of their excellent articles were useful to everyone, not just linux users. (I think I learned docker and mongodb from their articles).

If they start selling subscriptions again, please consider supporting them by getting one for your company.

Awesome. LJ was the only digital magazine I'm aware of that released their stuff with EPUB as an option, which made it readable on my Kobo.

Pretty much everywhere else is PDF or Mobi only. And yeah I can work with Mobi, it was just nice to have the open format supported.

Did Linux Foundation have some sort of relationship to Linux Journal or am I thinking of some other magazine/newspaper?

I wonder what the fine print of their new contract stipulates in terms of publishing freedoms....

I'd like to introduce our new editor in chief... Meepo!

maybe just make it an ads-supported linux blog site? linux is everywhere, if the blog articles are of high quality, i think there are many potential followers

An ad-supported, highly technical news web site?

The type of web site that probably has the highest percentage of visitors that use ad blockers?

yes the readers are probably going to block the ads.

however, let's assume whoever built this blog also know how to not let you block its ads.

1. put a sign saying please no-block, otherwise the site can not sustain.

2. embed the ads into your own blog server, the readers have to block the very site to block ads.

1: If this is in the places where ads would normally be I wouldn't mind, however I absolutely dislike popups.

2: Do you really think people who use adblockers will like this?

Obviously this also depends on how annoying the ads are.

if it's all about linux-related products I will be fine with the ads myself.

I for one wouldn't mind that. Assuming there is zero tracking, blinking and sound, of course.

Given the terrible state of the digital ad market (programmatic FTL) for even publishers with tens of millions of uniques a month and the propensity for LJ readers to (understandably) run an ad-blocker, I’d say this is a bad idea.

This isn’t 2005 anymore or 2010 or even 2015, when you could just slap on some AdSense ads and pay some of your bills. Let’s not even talk about LJ’s ridiculous overhead of designing a PDF magazine every month instead of just having a damn website (I guarantee you the “print” ad sales did not cover the costs of putting the digital publication together, not even close).

I’m glad it at least seems like the archives will be safe but this is the third timed in three years that LJ has died and been reborn...forgive me for being cynical and not expecting much from this.

nope totally against that

Good..

Now give me the print edition! I really miss reading LJ at the loo :)

May I recommend acquiring a tablet. Perhaps a PineTab would be to your taste?

It's not quite the same feel but I'll do in the mean time!

Congratulations, and welcome back!

I would miss LWN, but not Linux Journal.

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