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The Erlang Journal

wagerlabs.com

11 pointsprakash8 comments

Pay 10 dollars a month for something I could more or less get for free on the Erlang mailing list? I don't think so.

You don't need to buy Joe Armstrong's book either. All the information is available in the doc section of www.erlang.org.

I can take a look at a book, see whether my friends recommend it, and so on. It's a fixed, known quantity. A mailing list you've just started up is not. Especially at a price point that's neither:

* Free, in order to attract lots of people and get some network effects happening.

* Nor enough to compensate you for doing actual work to solve problems.

So to me it seems like neither fish nor fowl. If I want to hire a consultant to do stuff, that's one thing, and something I'd spend a lot more than 10 a month on! Free mailing lists are another. Something in between for a fairly niche topic... I'm not so hot on the idea.

I haven't been successful with poker software and would like to leave the past behind. The Erlang Journal is both a new business venture and psychological relief at the same time.

It doesn't require a lot of time to share the fair amount of information I collected while writing Hardcore Erlang and the feedback makes it worthwhile, even if the money isn't.

There's a marketing sideline to this as well. A member-only mailing list is a great way to size up the market. Perhaps there's none, perhaps there's a sizable one. If I get swamped with subscriptions then I could invite other experts to help me and, perhaps, sell products or services my subscribers would be interested in.

Also, I have a number of crazy Erlang projects in mind like a Mac Cocoa bridge, trading software and others. I could dedicate myself full-time to writing code for The Erlang Journal, if the number of subscribers allows it.

In the meantime, I don't look to solve all the problems that folks bring up, I just have to solve enough problems for them to keep coming back.

There's also a public source code repo at http://github.com/wagerlabs/thinkerlang/tree/master that you may want to take a look at.

Thanks. I'll pass.

Is it legal/fair to use a google-group for pay-only content? Is it fair from you to ask in a public list from now on?

All of us using a lot of information from public sources and use that bits to solve business/job related problems. Contributing an answer to a mailing list is a kind of repayment to the public but asking money for it is against the fair share.

The Google group is temporary, until I build the journal software in Erlang and migrate to it.

The content is pay-only but I balance it out by offering the source code from the journal to the public. The toolchain I'm building will be free as well. Check the repo link in the comment above.

Also, a lot of people make money from Erlang on the public Erlang Questions mailing list and still ask questions. There's nothing unfair about it.

The Erlang Journal is now free.

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