I’ve always wondered why we leaned towards that weird web viewer, but it is from long before my time with the journal and I’ve never actually asked. I guess it maybe has better inegration with the demographic that want to read a magazine rather than twitter threads and blog posts.
The original FreeBSD Journal, like the NSA, had two conflicting missions:
To raise awareness of FreeBSD and provide material for convincing CTOs that FreeBSD was safe to adopt.
To make money.
These are contradictory because the first requires maximising distribution, whereas the second requires limiting distribution. It took them a long time to give up on the second one. This was unfortunate because, as someone who has written over a couple of hundred articles and is a former FreeBSD Core Team member I was very enthusiastic about contributing to the Journal when it was launched, right up until I discovered that they were going to limit circulation.
A lot of the early decisions were based on the paid model. The web player thing made it easy to restrict access to paying subscribers, whereas a PDF is trivial to just share once you’ve downloaded it.
Thank you for linking directly to the PDF!
I’ve always wondered why we leaned towards that weird web viewer, but it is from long before my time with the journal and I’ve never actually asked. I guess it maybe has better inegration with the demographic that want to read a magazine rather than twitter threads and blog posts.
The original FreeBSD Journal, like the NSA, had two conflicting missions:
These are contradictory because the first requires maximising distribution, whereas the second requires limiting distribution. It took them a long time to give up on the second one. This was unfortunate because, as someone who has written over a couple of hundred articles and is a former FreeBSD Core Team member I was very enthusiastic about contributing to the Journal when it was launched, right up until I discovered that they were going to limit circulation.
A lot of the early decisions were based on the paid model. The web player thing made it easy to restrict access to paying subscribers, whereas a PDF is trivial to just share once you’ve downloaded it.
I seem to remember they used to be physically printed and mailed back when you paid for them. I imagine it’s leftover from that.