Linux Gazette

» see linuxgazette.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The thing to understand about Linux Gazette is that every issue could be downloaded as one file. Not a site you browsed, an issue you took. That design decision reads as a quirk now and was the entire point then, because the readership was on dial-up and paying for the call. On a 33.6k modem in Turkey in the late nineties, with the meter running, you did not read a magazine online. You pulled the whole issue down and then hung up. The reading happened with the modem silent. Linux Gazette shipped in that shape for sixteen years, including a Palm Pilot build of the final issue that is still sitting on the server.

John M. Fisk put out the first one in July 1995, as a free service, because Linux documentation in that era was a man page or nothing and the gap between the two was where every beginner got stuck. A year later he left for medical school and asked Specialized System Consultants to take it over. SSC was already publishing Linux Journal, the commercial magazine, and it agreed to keep the Gazette free and non-commercial.

The content was not reference material. It was people writing up what they had just figured out: a two-page shell trick, a hardware configuration that finally worked, a script somebody wrote at two in the morning. The masthead line, which is still at the top of the site, is "...making Linux just a little more fun!" and the archive reads exactly like that promise. Sixteen years of amateurs explaining things to other amateurs, indexed by month.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the answer gang ~

The column that made it was an accident of a mailing list. Jim Dennis started answering reader questions as The Answer Guy, and when the volume outgrew one person it became The Answer Gang: a public list where anyone could take a question. The whole conversation was then edited down and run in the next issue.

Published transcripts of people working a problem out in the open, argument and false starts included, rather than a clean answer handed down. It is the format Stack Overflow rebuilt later with reputation scores bolted on, and the Gazette was doing it monthly in HTML before most of the web had figured out that the mistakes were the useful part.

~ october 2003 ~

In October 2003 the staff quit. Their stated reasons were that SSC intended to stop releasing monthly issues, and that older material had been pulled from the archive without telling the authors who wrote it, which under the Open Publication License they regarded as theirs. The volunteers set up at linuxgazette.net and kept publishing on schedule. SSC kept linuxgazette.com and kept the name too.

For a while there were two Linux Gazettes, each insisting it was the real one, a fight small enough that most readers never noticed and bitter enough that the people involved are still findable arguing about it. SSC's version faded first. In early 2006 linuxgazette.com quietly started redirecting to Linux Journal.

~ the trademark that was not one ~

SSC had tried to settle the question legally. It filed for the Linux Gazette name as a service mark, application 78319880, claiming use going back to 1 August 1996. On 30 May 2004 the USPTO refused it, on two grounds: the words merely describe the subject matter of the thing, and publishing a magazine is not a "service" in the sense the statute means.

SSC had six months to answer and did not. The application was declared abandoned on 27 December 2004, and the follow-up notice bounced, because the company's address on file was no longer valid.

~ issue 186 ~

Issue 186 is dated June 2011 and there was never a 187. No closing statement appears on it, no farewell from the editor, no notice that this was the last one. The volunteer staff had thinned out, the monthly issue had stopped being how anybody read technical writing, and at some point the next one did not get assembled.

linuxgazette.net answers today with a real page, 9 KB, the gold logo still at the top and the copyright line reading 1996-2011. Every issue is there and so is the mirror list. The current-issue link points at June 2011 in a Palm database format, for a device that has been discontinued longer than the magazine has been dead. Somebody is paying for that hosting and has been for fifteen years.

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