On Wednesday 23 October 2002 09:41, Robin 'Roblimo' Miller wrote:
> rhatman@earthlink.net wrote:
> >Congratulations to Tina who has done it again.
> >http://www.theregus.com/content/4/26741.html
> >is a review of what happens when the Xandros Linux
> >CD is put in the beverage tray.
>
> (sigh) Originally published at NewsForge, as are a high percentage of
> the articles I see boosted on this list and others, although no one ever
> has courtesy to link to the original.
>
> Perhaps we should close the site. Why bother operating it and paying
> salaries if people only read our content elsewhere?
This sounds like a business model problem to me. It appears to be an issue of
OpenSource ideals applied to news media (about the OpenSource community no
less). Is SourceForge "opensourcing" content for other sites to reproduce at
will?
>From the TOS on the SF website, it appears that SourceForge "owns" the content
its salaried employees (or any users) create. (This from a precursory glance
- I'm speaking without checking this thoroughly).
You would think this reproduction would at least be syndicated with links to
the original articles on your site. RSS/RDF feeds are simply not entire
articles for republication.
If one portal offers a better view of other sites meta-syndicated content, how
can the source content portal compete? This all boils back to IP and
copyright law - something you don't want to get me started on.
How do content creators make back the money they spend on creating content?
Books, Periodicals, and other subscription based models collect direct
remuneration from consumers. By itself, this simply isn't enough to cover the
costs of newspapers and other costly media that make up the difference with
copious paid advertisements.
In the Internet model it is difficult to do this for anything other than
streaming multimedia content. Customers are simply unwilling to pay for text
they can find somewhere else with a search engine.
The Linux community is as much about Freedom (Libre) as it is about Free Beer.
We want to find information freely. If we can't find the information, we
always have the source to try and figure it out ourselves. Nothing is hidden.
The 'net has turned future generations into free content scavengers, and the
bubble spoiled us on incredible free content portals. At some point the
"Information should be free" idealism meets our capitalistic marketplace
where (Real) "Information is power". Content provider must adapt toward
providing valuable Quality Information that customers are willing to pay for,
or are doomed to mediocrity (or shoe-string budget Quality) content
generation into the public sea of information that is the global Internet.
Personally, I would rather indiscriminately wade in that public sea of
information through focused portals gathering the nuggets of value myself.
Time is money however: the less time I have, the more willing I am toward
paying for Quality concentrated information sources.
I'm sure Robin has a strong opinion about this.
- Ian C. Blenke <icblenke@nks.net> <ian@blenke.com> http://ian.blenke.com
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