Friday, January 28, 2005

Tux won't be visiting I guess I spoke slightly too soon about the Linux print magazine boom. I got a note Wednesday from (former) Tux Magazine editor Marcel Gagne announcing that SSC had decided to make Tux a PDF-only publication, instead of a distributed-all-over-the-place print pub. No one says, but usually those decisions get made after the publisher doesn't sell enough ads to make it viable. This is disappointing, and we note that even the first PDF issue is late to appear on the Tux site, as well as the free "subscription" page. This is actually the second time this has happened to me: that is, signing up to write for a soon-to-be-launched Linux print magazine only to be told later that it wouldn't be coming out after all. In the other instance, they'd  done a mockup of the front page and put it on their website. My story was at the top, which was very cool. The "magazine"  was Linux Business Week, the story was "2001: Year of the Linux Desktop?" Yeah, the crystall ball was a little hazy, but I did put that question mark in there. What was perhaps more annoying was the piece didn't get up on the website for several months, so the prediction looked even flatter! (BTW, I would have linked to the story, but they've taken it out of the web archive. Here's a link to that mockup via the Wayback Machine. And if you click on one of my stories here, you can indeed get to all my LBW work!) Life in the freelance biz is never easy. 11:16:00 AM    comment []