This is awesome. I noticed the digital and print price was about the same and saw this in the FAQ:
Q. Will you create an interactive HTML 5/Ubuntu/Android/iOS/Windows
8 appfor digital magazine delivery?
A. We will get our magazine onto digital storefronts straight away.
And we have ambitious plans for our own app - one where our community
becomes part of the editorial. But to start with, we need to focus on
getting our new magazine out of our heads and into your hands. We’ll
then be able to invest in our other ideas.
It would be really cool if they put out a nice interactive html5 app for viewing the digital version, and then open sourced it for the readers to make better (and for other magazines to use).
We expect to be in the shops in the uk in February 2014 (and we'll ship physical or digital copies to the rest of the world then). We hope to be in newsagents and book stores world wide not long after that, but it will depend on our distributors.
When I saw the headline I was hoping the same, CMU Sphinx and some of the others are well behind the commercial offerings. Microsoft and Cambridge hold some key patents I believe, it would be interesting to see what deep neural nets/RBMs might offer as an alternative. Not sure what Ubuntu is using or going to use for their mobile OS. I would love to hear from any HN experts with up to date information in this space.
The model is similar to lwn.net, where if you're a sub you get the great stuff straight away, if you're not you get it a week later. Which has always appealed to me.
This seems to be similar to that, with the huge difference that the article is then "freed" totally after 9 months. Great idea, I'll sign up for this.
Andrew came to see us the other day and chat about their vision for Linux Voice. They know what they are doing and all have a solid publishing background so we can't wait to see how it turns out.
It's a really refreshing approach and they are committed to giving back to the FOSS community from the profits generated by it. I also really like that they plan to release the content for other uses after a brief embargo.
I like this model, and hope the magazine catches on. Hopefully it will help provide one more step in figuring out how to help compensate people who do FOSS for their efforts.
Vaguely related: A thought I've been having lately is that instead of micro payments being a direct monetary thing, why not team up with ISPs, hosting providers, etc, and have an organization a "points" system similar to loyalty programs. Points can then be used to provide a discounts on hosting and bandwidth, and distributed both individually by people and by projects to contributors. This helps reduce some of the friction in transactions...
(I used to freelance for Future years ago, and the standing joke was that, at the time, all their magazines were "something-or-other Format". When they launched a cross-stitch magazine, we were greatly disappointed it wasn't called Cross-Stitch Format.)
Oh my! Please tell me the entire magazine was actually made of Cross-Stitched pages!!! I would so like a copy. Frame a few of the good ones, use the rest as table-mats and coasters :)
The old magazine was Linux Format. We left because we were prevented from making the magazine as good as it could be by layers of management that didn't understand (or care about) Linux or our target audience.
