Ex-Future staff start crowdfunding for rival Linux magazine

Three former writers from Future’s Linux Format magazine have set up a crowdfunding effort to establish a rival title.

It’s called Linux Voice and is being made by former deputy editor Andrew Gregory, Mike Saunders and Ben Everard. The Indiegogo campaign is looking to raise 90,000, of which over 10k has already been raised with 42 days remaining.

If successful it is hoped the first issue will be published in February, although the project will be delivered as a PDF at first. The idea is for half of its profits to be given to free software and Linux communities” which will be reader selected.

We want to sponsor projects, events, developers, and evangelise the cause,” the Indiegogo campaign page reads. We want to build long-term relationships with the people we sponsor, so there’s less uncertainty for projects year-on-year.

We’ve been bucking the trend of declining print sales for years, and we’re not going to stop now by messing around with the magic formula. We want to be the voice of the Linux and open source community, but above all, we want to help that community to grow.

Our pricing will always be fair. Magazines are expensive to create but we want to remove much of the mystery. We’re going to charge a flat rate for a baseline print or digital subscription and only charge cost for distribution. This won’t make our magazine dramatically cheaper in the UK, where we’re based, but it will make the magazine much cheaper elsewhere.

We won’t have community sapping fire sales or unpredictable marketing strategies. The price we charge is the cost of making the best magazine we can, and nothing else.”

It will also make its content freely available nine months after publication with a view to creating a library of tutorials, features and code, adding: We don’t believe in charging several times for the same ‘evergreen’ content.”