The year before last I was listening to one of my favourite podcasts and at the end the genial bunch of guys on it announced that it would be their last episode. I think I said WTF out loud. Not only that, the podcast was associated with the magazine Linux Format and they were leaving that too. A bit of a blow for that magazine as they were most of the editorial team.
But they didn't go away. No siree. Soon they announced that they were going to crowd source a new magazine called Linux Voice. They aimed to raise £90,000 and after a month they'd raised a whopping £127,603 from 2347 people. I had a tiny hand in that, by chipping in some cash myself, and by plugging their cause any way I could, including on my own podcast Tuxjam when my co-host Kevie invited Linux Voice's Andrew Gregory on during the fundraising campaign.
As impressive as that success was, I think they topped it because not only have they survived a year (and hopefully many more), but they produced an excellent magazine and they actually made a profit which, true to their word, they shared with a number of free and open source projects as voted for by their readers. Not just that, they've released all content under a Creative Commons license nine months after it was published. To be clear what that means - not only can you read it for free, but more importantly, remix and reuse it to create new content to share with others.
I should declare I have a particular interest in their venture as I'm now listed as a contributing editor. I've written a number of articles over the last year on topics ranging from comet hunting with Python, through to Linux kernel parameter tweaking and writing code for analysing the stockmarket. Doing so has been nothing but a pleasure and I've enjoyed corresponding about these articles with Andrew Gregory along the way.
If you are curious about linux, do go and buy a copy of Linux Voice. It's on the shelf in many newsagents, or you can head over to linuxvoice.com and have a look at free content and if you like it buy a subscription. Their podcast is very good too, and infinitely good value for money (literally, it's free!).
Well done Andrew, Ben, Graham and Mike! (That's in alphabetical order of first name, which they can note down and use next time they get confused in their podcast.)