20 Years of LWN

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Back in mid-1997, your editor (Jonathan Corbet) and Liz Coolbaugh were engaged in a long-running discussion on how to trade our nice, stable, reliably paying jobs for a life of uncertainty, poverty, and around-the-clock work. Not that we thought of it in those terms, naturally. We eventually settled on joining Red Hat's nascent "support partner" program; while we were waiting for it to get started, we decided to start a weekly newsletter as a side project — not big and professional like the real press — to establish ourselves in the community. Thus began an amazing journey that has just completed its 20th year.

After some time thinking about what we wanted to do and arguing about formats, we published our first edition on January 22, 1998. It covered a number of topics, including the devfs controversy, the pesky 2GB file-size limit on the ext2 filesystem, the use of Linux on Alpha to render scenes in the film "Titanic", the fact that Red Hat had finally hired a full-time quality-assurance person and launched the Red Hat Advanced Development Labs, and more. We got almost no feedback on this issue, though, perhaps because we didn't tell anybody that we had created it.

We were determined not to repeat that mistake after publishing the January 29 edition so, showing the high level of marketing skill that has characterized LWN all along, we sent a brief note to the linux-announce mailing list. We didn't say much about what were doing and had a URL that nobody could spell, but the traffic came and LWN was well and truly launched. We reported on the devfs controversy and predicted, correctly, that the big kernel lock would probably not be completely removed from the kernel before the 2.2 release. See, your editor's predictions aren't always wrong.

We were arguably helped by the lead news in that edition, though: Netscape's decision to open-source its "Communicator" web browser. That quickly brought the world's attention to open-source software, though that term would not be invented for a few months yet, and to Linux in particular. LWN was a shadow of what it is now, but it was evidently good enough to ride on that wave and establish itself as a part of the Linux community.

Over the following years we have borne witness to a long series of events that none of us could really have predicted. Linux got caught up in the dotcom boom and, with the VA Linux Systems IPO, came to epitomize its excesses, but when that boom went boom, Linux was still there, stronger than ever. The SCO Group tried to steal our community's work and turn it into its own rent-generating machine; in the process of fending them off it was made clear that the Linux kernel had one of the cleanest code bases around. Companies discovered our little hobbyist system and invested billions into it, massively accelerating development at all levels of the system. We learned how to scale development communities from dozens of developers up to many thousands of developers. The security environment, which was initially defending against script kiddies playing their own form of Capture the Flag, became a fight against spammers, organized criminals, and nation states with vast resources. Google bought an obscure phone operating system called Android and used it to dominate the phone market; as a result, we got mobile devices that are far more open than they would otherwise have been. Linux became the base software supporting the bulk of the Internet economy; some of our biggest contributors do not distribute Linux at all, but they use it internally and want to help make it work better.

And so on. It has been quite a ride. We in the free-software community set out to change the world, and we succeeded beyond our wildest expectations.

Through all of this, we also got to learn some lessons about successfully running a community information source on the net. We were acquired during the dotcom days and unacquired after those days came to their abrupt end. The advertising business failed utterly to work for us, leading to that sad day in 2002 when we announced that we could no longer continue and that LWN would shut down. A flood of donations from our readers convinced us to give the subscription model a try; after a couple of months of frantic site-code hacking, we adopted the subscription model that, with only minor tweaks, sustains us to this day.

Our model remains nearly unique, but it suits the site well. Relying on subscriptions aligns our interests firmly with those of our readers. Keeping content behind the paywall for a relatively short period seems to be enough to motivate subscriptions while allowing our content to quickly become part of the community record (though it seems that relatively few people realize that this content becomes CC-BY-SA licensed after the subscription period ends). The "subscriber link" mechanism, suggested by our readers, has become one of our most powerful marketing tools. All told, it is not a model that has made any of us rich, but working for LWN is not an exercise in poverty anymore either. It has kept us going to reach a point none of us ever thought we would see — the 20th anniversary of our first Weekly Edition.

Along the way, various people have come and gone within LWN itself; only your editor is crazy enough to have been here the whole time, though Rebecca Sobol, who is still part of the crew, has been around since nearly the beginning. Current staff is rounded out by Jake Edge; we are still looking to hire more, please contact us if you would like to become part of the LWN writer/editor team. Meanwhile, we thank Elizabeth Coolbaugh, Forrest Cook, Dennis Tenney, Dave Whitinger, Michael Hammel, Michael Kerrisk, and Nathan Willis for being a part of LWN over the years. You are all missed.

We have had the privilege of traveling to events all over the world; in the process we have met — and become friends with — many of our readers and many people in the community as a whole. This community is an amazing group of people; it has been a honor and a joy to be a part of it. In the process, we hope that we have helped to knit this community together a bit more tightly, to help it be a real community. We also hope to have the privilege of continuing to do so for some time yet. The free-software community's work is not done, and neither is ours. Thanks to all of you for being with us these last 20 years! We're looking forward to what is yet to come.

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