Kuro5hin back from the dead

Rusty: You really should seize the opportunity and only open K5 to paying subscribers. You will never get a better chance than this to make your work worthwhile. I am reluctant to pay to participate, nevertheless I would do it just to access K5 now. We are all starving.

raph, this Harvard kid is willing to pay for free services because they are all starving for intellectual exchange. Why don't we give him the privilege of paying subsribtion fee to have an account here ?

I noticed you changed my certification from "Master" to "Apprentice" - that's very subtle .-)

However - yes, the diary entry was actually tounge in cheek, most diary entries at Advogato are.

Further - I think we need to encourage Rusty, not discourage him. I can't imagine all the time and money he spends on K5. I think all frequent K5:ers should consider a small contribution, otherwise K5 will one day be dead for real.

Mikael

I appreciate the encouragement a lot -- don't get me wrong. But honestly, I'd do it anyway. Running K5 is way too much fun. Except when it really sucks. But hey, nothing's perfect.

If you want to give me money, though, do go ahead. I got rent to pay, like everyone. :-)

ok. apologies are all mine for "nice" kind of nosy to pull out private diary entry as one public issue.

But there are a lot of frustrations around at this time and doubts that good will to work for common good can not sustain its vitality once this "common" reaches over a certain threshold and starts to drain life out of good. When that point reaches, we have to adopt "not so perfect good" for the everspreading coverage of "common" so as to maximize this "common good" as a whole in a materialized and sustainable way. It is far too easy to fall back to old dealings of business. But I believe the spirit of Free Software remains forever sparkles of new life that die hard.

I would like Rusty to get filthy rich from his dealings with K5. In my opinion, the best defence for the free software movement would be a sustainable business model. When you depend on the efforts of the ones sharing your vision you will probably lose momentum compared to the ones only depending on financial incentives, that is propietary software developers. However - if you could combine the financial incentives with the vision of open source or free software I think you could achieve something even bigger than what we have at our hands today.

Okay - we are getting a little of track now, but I think the next big step for open source and free software is Microsoft opening up its code. It will happen.

Mikael

Ok, rusty. I am going to pull out my plastic card and send out subscription fee to commeroate kuro5hin's growing pain from age 64.152.13.45 to 207.99.115.72 :-)

Maybe a fund raising event during jolly holiday season can be planned ahead of time. Raised fund can be used to setup a tape backup system for the database and to secure our ring leader's job prosperity etc.

mpawlo: I would like Rusty to get filthy rich from his dealings with K5.

That makes two of us. ;-)

No, I'm kidding. That's actually not really true. Poor comes with problems, but filthy rich sure does too. What I want out of life is to enjoy what I do (check), live with someone I love (check), and be happy where I live (check). Right now, I have everything I really, truly need.

Now, I'd like to buy a house someday soon, I'd like to get a dog, I'll probably want to have kids in a few years. All these things require money, so yep, I definitely need some of that. But not all that much, you know? One of the strengths of the K5 "model" (if it can be called that) is that it's cheap. It's not easy, no, but it is cheap. One or two people who are really passionate about the site, and a lot of work. That's what it costs, basically.

My goal right now is to make it so K5 supports me, on it's own. There's a lot of people there, and all I have to do is offer some relatively small portion of them something of enough value that they'll give me a few bucks for it. It's not earth-shattering, and won't catch the atention of the business press, but this is what the net is going to look like in the future. Smaller, cheaper, and better.

I can't wait till the last fumes of the dot-com era waft out of the place and the media move on to some other feeding frenzy so we can get on with doing what actually matters, without someone always expecting us to cash in and try to make it huge.

You heard it here first: Small is the new Big.

I disagree. I don't see the vision of Free Software movement is to force everyone to open up their code. More important than opening up the code is to adhere and engage in open standards, to foster a competitive market through innovation instead of monoply power.