> William Lachance pointed out that AWN is one of the very visible things > we have which makes AbiWord look like an active project, unlike many > others where all time between releases is silence before the storm.
very good point > I know that. I joined AbiWord development originally due to AWN (which > lured me) and POWs (which kept me in). This is also why I started > editing AWN when Sam stopped. i remember paul (?) tried to revive the Project of the Week ages ago. I agree it is important, so if people have ideas of how to run this efficientlly (maybe by selecting trivial/ehancement bugs?) and revive it please mail the developer list. > But the problem is, I'm not sure it's worth spending my time/energy on > AWN anymore. There's been far too little feedback from readers for me to > want to spend more time on it. Going subscription based is my attempt at > finding the energy to continue by forcing the readers to acknowledge an > interest in what I do, basically. > I've briefly considered adding a clause to the effect of: > > If more than 200 people pay for a subscription in any one quarter, > AWN will be publically available in that quarter. > > Of course, it requires very little imagination to see the resulting > private/public/private/public states each quarter this could result in. Ah, the Street Performer Protocol, yet another way to earn a fair price. > Not to mention the fact that those first 200 subscribers would feel > suckered when I started making AWN public again. it might work if the fee is small, which it is. subcribers would get the news in a timely manner, which is what makes it most useful. if they knew in advance i would be surprised if they felt cheated, the old news would be added to the free archive eventually anyway (i would guess). > There is an alternative which I didn't bother mention because it's so > unlikely to happen; some corporation with an interest in AWN continuing > to be publically available could pay me the equivalent of 200 > subscriptions per quarter. I would still get no feedback from the > readers, but at least I would have financial compensation (yeah, my time > is for sale). in terms of feedback perhaps a message board at the bottom of the news would help ... might not be worth the setup and maintainance tho' > Nobody would be more happy for AWN to remain public and gratis edited by > me, but it would require a fundamental change in human behavior or some > corp to give me money. Both rather unlikely, I'm afraid... Here's hoping it all works out well > Thanks, > Jesper Thanks for providing us with the free service for so long Sincerely Alan Horkan PS i probably should not have replied to both list, consider carefully before replying to all
