No more Linux Journal for me

, Will Kahn-Greene | share this (mastodon)
Note: This is an old post in a blog with a lot of posts over a long span of time. The world has changed, technologies have changed, and I've changed. It's likely this is out of date, the code doesn't work, the ideas haven't aged well, or the ideas were terrible to begin with. Let me know if you think this is something that needs updating.

A couple of issues ago, Don Marti passed editorialship of Linux Journal to a new guy who immediately started tossing in his "rants" at the end of the magazine. Additionally, the magazine got a face-over which seems to me to be more marketing-oriented than content oriented but that might fix itself over the next few issues.

Regardless, I find the "rants" to be obnoxious at best and downright juvenile at worst. I find people who enjoy ranting and enjoy arguing like it's a pleasurable hobby to be far worse for the general state of things than those who research and mull in a quieter fashion.

For example, in the April 2006 issue, he rants with incredible vitriol about people who are working towards building a clean-room open-source implementation of Java. He goes on to say that he'd happily pay Sun if they charged for Java because he uses Jedit and it's the best editor on the planet.

This is such a bizarre misunderstanding of the state of things and he's managed to do all of this in two paragraphs. But there's more! He moves on to ranting about a bunch of other stuff and ends with this:

"Use what's best. What a concept. Linux developers seem to get it. It's about time the open-source zealots got it too."

I find this stunningly naive and ignorant. Worse, it's one-sided and emotionally-charged misleading drivel that other people are going to read. It's definitely NOT what belongs in Linux Journal which up until this new editor was filled with intelligent material, clever humor, and useful information that I was eager to read every month.

Anyhow, bottom line is that my subscription is up next month and I'm not going to renew.

I was tossing around not writing a blog entry about this, but then I noticed Jeff Waugh write his thoughts which interestingly match mine.

Want to comment? Send an email to willkg at bluesock dot org. Include the url for the blog entry in your comment so I have some context as to what you're talking about.