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Comment by kachapopopow | Hacker News Reader

I always wondered about these /SubscriberLink/ links. Is sharing them considered unethical?

From the LWN FAQ:

> Where is it appropriate to post a subscriber link?

> Almost anywhere. Private mail, messages to project mailing lists, and blog entries are all appropriate. As long as people do not use subscriber links as a way to defeat our attempts to gain subscribers, we are happy to see them shared.

Representatives of LWN have posted here before saying they are OK with it, along with a polite request not to have it go overboard since they need to fund the site and writers, editors, etc. That funding comes from subscriptions only IIUC.

FWIW an LWN subscription is pretty affordable and supports some of the best in-depth technical reporting about Linux and linux-related topics available.

(I am not affiliated with LWN, just a happy subscriber - I also credit some of my career success to the knowledge I've gained by reading their articles).

A couple times now I’ve remembered to refill my subscription after my old one ran out of months thanks to an LWN free article being posted to HN.

So n=1 it’s an effective advertising tactic even though I can read the specific article for free.

Funding also comes from sponsors, as the article obviously states:

"I would like to thank LWN's travel sponsor, the Linux Foundation, for travel assistance to Montreal for XDC."

I'm sure that they are very, very happy that HN is directing a firehose of traffic at their site on the regular.

In order to subscribe people need to know that LWN exists.

I know this is off on a tangent, but I recently signed up for LWN and it's well worth the price. The articles and news items alone are worth it, but the archive is just amazing.

Same here. I originally found LWN through a HN post. I've been a subscriber for a few years now, and I'm reading almost everything they publish, even if I'm not always understanding everything they talk about. The quality of writing is very high.

The purpose of these links is to be shared, see the FAQ: https://lwn.net/op/FAQ.lwn#slinks

The LWN paywall is unique in that all the content becomes freely available after a week. The subscriber links are there to encourage you to subscribe if you are in a position to do so.

It says,

> The following subscription-only content has been made available to you by an LWN subscriber.

I might be wrong but I read that as there being funding to make the previously paywalled content available, probably on an article-specific basis. Does anyone know?

Also from the LWN FAQ:

> What are subscriber links

> A subscriber link is a mechanism by which LWN subscribers may grant free access to specific LWN articles to others. It takes the form of a special link which bypasses the subscription gate for that article.

It's not different from shared articles here from subscriber-only newsletters being accompanied by the archived link in the topmost comment.

Users here seem to not care about those "ethics"

There's nothing ethically wrong about sharing LWN subscriber links on HN when the LWN editor has repeatedly posted on HN that doing so is fine.

There's a difference between posting a sub-only link to that's intended to be shared in moderation, and posting a link to pay walled article as if to expect the clicker of that link to pay for a sub to that website just so they can read that article.

Its a pretty absurd expectation.

It's really not such a big deal since everything on LWN becomes public after some weeks. Rather the opposite, it ensures that the site remains well-known.

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