Nikhil, To your original question the answer is 1) Linux Magazine is not in the bussiness of selling the magazine, it is in the bussiness of selling its subscribers to advertisers. Once that part is clear, everything follows. 2) It is true that it the magazine does serve poeple interested in GNU/Linux, but that is its secondary function. You can get a sense of this by looking at any magazine ratio of subscription income to advertising income. Its usually 1:2
And if their money helps keep us in business producing an information resource valued by the Linux community we serve, isn't that a good for all of us?
Nope. Eventually whoever pays the piper calls the tune.
If I may ask, are you a subscriber to our publication? Are you too helping to keep us in business? I would be glad to think so.
This is critical, I am not talking about Linux Mag, but the more directly we support media or any organization the better it is.
To understand more about media, I can only refer you to Manufacturing Consent http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Herman%20/Manufac_Consent_Prop_Model.html http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Herman%20/Conclusions_ManufacConsent.html or http://chomskytorrents.org/TorrentDetails.php?TorrentID=32
-Krishna
--- Nikhil Prabhakar prabhakar.nikhil@gmail.com wrote:
Hi, I had mailed to linux-mag.com http://linux-mag.com/ about the issue of M$ ad on their site spreading "Get The Facts" propaganda.Here is their response:
Dear Mr. Prabhakar,
How, in a semi-free society, can we deny the right
of one company to buy
advertising space from us but not others? We have
no policy enabling us to
censor advertisers, except when they break the law
(fraud, libel, lewd
solicitations, etc). Microsoft wants to put out a
message of its alternative
solutions to the open source community, and they've
chosen our
well-respected and well-trafficked site to do so.
Personally, I think will prove to be a waste of
time, as your note reveals.
Think of it as a sign of the pressure that
Microsoft and all makers of
proprietary software are feeling because of the
relentless momentum behind
open source, open standard solutions. And if their
money helps keep us in
business producing an information resource valued
by the Linux community we
serve, isn't that a good for all of us?
If I may ask, are you a subscriber to our
publication? Are you too helping
to keep us in business? I would be glad to think
so.
Regards,
Robert Wells, Ph.D. VP, Business Development Linux Magazine
Regards
nipra
"Live Life Ethically"
www.gnu.org/philosophy http://www.gnu.org/philosophy _______________________________________________ Fsf-friends mailing list Fsf-friends@mm.gnu.org.in http://mm.gnu.org.in/mailman/listinfo/fsf-friends
===================================== To Reflect, to Inspire and to Empower http://www.employees.org/~krishnap/
The great moral question of the twenty-first century is: If all knowledge, all culture, all art, all useful information, can be costlessly given to everyone at the same price that it is given to anyone -- if everyone can have everything, everywhere, all the time, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone from anything? -Eben Moglen
__________________________________ Yahoo! Music Unlimited Access over 1 million songs. Try it free. http://music.yahoo.com/unlimited/