This is interesting - LWN has tried to support itself on a subscription model (subscribers get access to articles 1 week early), but apparently revenue isn't high enough:
http://lwn.net/Articles/350385/
Many commenters have pointed out that Ars Technica manages to have in-depth technical articles supported by only ads and asked why LWN can't do that same. Honestly, I'm not convinced the Ars Technica proposition is enough to make me sign up - but I'm a poor student and so very little really would unless I viewed it as essential to my studies.
I thought to post this here for two reasons. Firstly, I'm sure many here frequently enjoy LWN's excellent writing. Also, perhaps people have some ideas about what sort of business model might allow LWN to keep going and to grow stronger in the future?
For this sort of thing, it would seem helpful to release it under "any license viewed as free by the FSF" or similar. Is that sort of statement likely to cause problems? Or at least license it MIT/BSD/whatever. For such a small piece, it would be nice if projects can just import it without having to move from "all code is BSD" to "all code is BSD except bithacks.h which is MIT, but we also comply with that license".
Yes, it is against their terms of service and I'm sure they enforce it. They now market their storage as "Unlimited + xGB" where the x GB is the amount of space you're allowed to use as personal backup space (currently 50GB).
I'm quite sure I read an interview or maybe just a mailing list posting where the author of sqlite (D. Richard Hipp) said that he in someway regretted releasing sqlite in the public domain, or at least if he knew what he knows now about the legal issues surrounding public domain he might reconsider. I can't find it. Does anybody else remember reading something similar or did I just imagine it?
http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3634
http://anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3634 (printable)