jeg@ptsfa.PacBell.COM (John Girard) (09/30/88)
> 9/29/88 > > After reading Alan Holub's "last column" that had not been > published, I sent a copy to Jon Erickson and asked him why I > should continue to read DDJ. His reply was quick, and he asked > me to post his view of the situation on the net, for equal > representation. Obviously, there is a conflict between Alan > and Jon. But Jon says he is leaving the door open to readers > to comment, and that he will respond personally. > > Please send any feedback direct to Jon at DDJ. > Over the past few weeks, there's been quite a lot of discussion about Dr. Dobb's Journal, much of it rumor, innuendo, and specu- lation. And, as you might expect, more than a little bit of this has been just plain misinformation. Because of problems such as this, I devoted my Editorial in the September '88 issue of the magazine specifically to the subject of what you can expect with DDJ. A lot of what I'll say here about the sort of things DDJ will be doing is discussed in more depth there. One thing I said there bears repeating: "Believe it not, we are kind of happy to find out that DDJ readers care enough about the magazine to raise a stink when they feel their magazine is being threatened." I'd also like to say that I won't be following up on this thread here on Usenet since I don't want to get into any mud-slinging matches; they just aren't that productive. However, I am glad to talk with any of you who want to drop me a letter or give me a phone call. I can be reached at (415) 366-3600 or be mailed letters to Jon Erickson, Editor-in-Chief, DDJ, 501 Galvenston Dr., Redwood City, CA 94063. If you send me a letter, I'll phone you back. This will be a fairly long message; I apologize for that but it seems that the time is warranted. One last note before launching into a few specifics: the articles and programs in DDJ are primarily reader-submitted. If you would like to see an article on a specific topic, let me know, or better yet, write it and submit it. DDJ is one of the few maga- zines left around that still relies on *reader* submissions and support. If the magazine isn't what you want or need, you can do something about it by submitting an article. 1. The decision to cancel Allen Holub's monthly column was mine. I did so because Allen would not allow us to provide his source listings free of charge (like every other program in the maga- zine) on our CompuServe forum or at cost to readers through our disk distribution service. Instead he wanted to sell the source code through his own software business. I felt his column was becoming, in effect, a free advertisment for his business. When I cancelled the column, I told Allen that I valued his association with the magazine and with the C language and would like to put him under a new contract as a contributing editor to write feature articles and reviews. At first he said that he was in- terested but then apparently declined. 2. The ratio of advertising to editorial pages has been going up in favor of editorial pages since I joined DDJ. I have insisted on that. Our November issue will be greater than 40 percent edi- torial which is average or above average for the industry. In the first part of this year, we were running about 50 pages of edi- torial per issue. For the past few months, this has risen to about 60, and next year we are planning up to 80 pages in some months. Even if an increase in ad pages doesn't happen as expect- ed, we will be increasing the ratio above what it is now. 3. We will continue to publish listings and those listings will continue to be more than just quick examples. In January '89, for instance, we are going to publish a graphics utility that is more than 1200 lines of code. In March/April of next year, we are planning on publishing the source code of an implementation of Scheme. WE WILL ALWAYS PUBLISH CODE AND MAKE IT AVAILABLE TO READERS. We'll occasionally run an article that does not have code (one article in December won't have any), but, for me, a DDJ article means text AND code. And more pages in the magazine means more code. 4. The magazine is not going mass-market, low-tech. DDJ readers want to be challenged, not coddled. We will not spoon-feed you, we expect that you are experienced, advanced programmers who don't need to have a simple concepts explained. 5. The technical staff at DDJ is being expanded. Kent Porter is the senior technical editor who started in July and we are ad- vertising for another technical editor right now. We have expand- ed our list of contributing editors as well. Management has less to do with the editorial content of this magazine than with any magazine I've ever seen. They don't tell us what to publish and in fact seem afraid to bring up the subject. I respect them for that if nothing else. My responsibilty lies with readers, not with advertisers or management. 6. Our columns currently consist of C programming, Structured Programming, and Programming Paradigmns. We may include another next year as our page count continues to increase. 7. As a courtesy to Allen, I offered him the opportunity to write a final column. What he turned in was a scurrilous attack on me and the magazine. He called it his "final editorial." I decided on not publishing it (would you have?) since it didn't serve any purpose to the reader. What you saw on Usenet was a version of it, by the way. The acknowledgement at the end of the C column was not my words, but those of the columnist who was simply pay- ing tribute to Allen for his work over the years. I don't want to get into the specifics of what we pay contributors and what we were paying Allen. Our payment varies from $500 to about $1000 per article, depending on a number of factors such as length, etc. I also pay bonuses to authors who go out of their way to meet a tough deadline. I do not accept "free" articles from indi- viduals who are associated with a company. Allen was getting paid at the top of the scale, not the bottom and I didn't save any mo- ney with the new columnist. I don't look at the code associated with an article as being separate from the article. The text tells you what the author had in mind, the code tells you what the author is really saying. You can't have a DDJ article without code and Allen was getting paid (handsomely) to provide a monthly column -- this means text and code. On another subject: Our November graphics lineup looks like this: "Photorealism and Computer Graphics" "Perspectives on Graphical Interfaces" "Image Compression via Image Compilation" "Dynamic Run-Time Structures" "Mapping DOS Memory Blocks" "Inserting Ele- ments into a BASIC Integer Array" and a review of Prolog/V (in- cluded with Smalltalk/V). For our December operating system is- sue, we'll be running "Writing Portable Software" "Unix vs. Unix" "Writing OS/2 Applicationw with I/O Privledges" "Undocumented DOS Functions" "Writing Programs for MultiFinder" "LRU Algorithms" "Finding Functions from Inside Brief". January is neural networks with articles on "A Neural Net for Pattern Recognition" "Under- standing Hopfield Nets" "Neural Nets for Noise Filtering" "Streams in Unix" "Postscript Fonts". Again, if there are any other subjects you'd like to see covered, write them up and send them my way. Thanks. Jon
holub@violet.berkeley.edu (10/07/88)
This posting is my (Allen Holub's) response to Jon Erickson's posting <4523@ptsfa.PacBell.com>, put on the net by John Girard. I'm not sure how long this debate should continue, but I feel that Jon's posting was misleading, and that several of his points need answering: >> What you saw on Usenet was a version of [the original >> editorial]...[It is] a scurrilous attack on me an the >> magazine. The editorial that was posted is exactly what Jon got, my own additional comments are clearly labeled as such. You can judge for yourself about its publishability, but I think that something should have been printed--if not the editorial that I wrote, at least an honest account of what had happened. When Jon said that I could have the September "Running Light" space, he essentially asked me to lie to you--to talk about how great a time I had had with DDJ (true) and how it was just time for me to move on to other things (an outright lie, had I said it). This, after he terminated the column without any reason given to me (this article by Jon, posted to the net by someone else and not directed to me personally, is the ONLY way that I found out about Jon's reasons. He's still not given me a reason directly). In any event, it seems by Jon's own admission, that the editorial was largely to the point, not a "scurrilous attack" as claimed. I might also add that scur- rilous means "using or given to course language...containing obscenities or coarse abuse... [Webster's New Collegiate: 1980]. The language in this editorial was strong, but it wasn't scurrilous. >> ...He wanted to sell the code through his own software >> business...His column was becoming a free advertisement >> for his business...I do not accept "free" articles from >> individuals...associated with a company. My company has one employee--me. It provided one service-- distributing code from an occasional C Chest. The programs cost $20-$30. I've sold a total of 110 programs this year. Get real Jon. I'm not Bill Gates. >> Our payment varies from $500 to $1000 per article... Allen >> was getting paid at the top of the scale. I think, frankly, that this rate is scandalous exploitation. Many of those $500 programs represent literally months of work, and paying a programmer less than the minimum wage for what is usually excellent work is inappropriate at best. The renumeration is proportional to the space occupied in the magazine by the final article, not the amount of work involved. On the average, the C Chest took about two weeks of solid work to produce. (That's just the article and code, it doesn't count reading, learning how to use new compilers and products, and so forth). This breaks down to a gross of about $12.50/hour. Since I'm self employed, though, a good sized chunk of this goes to the IRS (I pay 14% for social security right off the top). I also have to provide my own office supplies, office furniture, medical insurance, computers, and so forth. So in terms of real money, I'm able to keep about half of that $12.50. In addition, about 4 days of the two weeks left to me in the month are needed to do accounting, office chores, answering letters, and other things usually done by a secretary. This leaves 6 days per month for doing consulting work, not much to take on any- thing like a real project. Finally, bear in mind that since C Chest was a monthly column, I couldn't spread that two weeks of work over several months, as do most of DDJ's authors. That is, I couldn't hold down a normal job and write the C Chest too. Unlike most DDJ authors, I had to live off of what DDJ payed me. My contract with DDJ was written with all this in mind--it said that it was okay for me to distribute occasional programs to make enough money to live. The other economic issue is that DDJ profits considerably from an authors' work. People buy the magazine for the articles, after all. Subscriptions are $20 times 50,000 readers. A full-page ad in DDJ costs about $3000.00 and there are typically 90 pages of advertisements in the magazine. You can do the rest of the math yourself. I think that the percentage of this income that is paid to authors accurately reflects DDJ's priorities. >> Allen would not allow us to provide his source listings >> free of charge. Not true. The only time we discussed the issue, I told him that most listings could be put onto CompuServe as usual (if you can call the cost of downloading several hundred K of code "free of charge"). Occasionally, however, when the program was large enough to justify it, I wanted to dis- tribute the code myself. As an alternative, I suggested that DDJ could have all the code if it would pay me enough to live. $1200/year doesn't even make the house payments, and is well below a fresh-out-of-school starting salary for a programmer. I guess, from his response, that this suggestion was not acceptable. At no point did Jon tell me that he would cancel the column if I didn't give him the code for free. We only discussed the matter once, and I was under the impression that we were still discussing it when Jon cancelled the column. Also, bear in mind the small sum I was asking for programs (typically $20-$30) was often less than the download costs. You got an executable version of the program, so didn't have to worry about porting the code to your compiler. Also, the programs often incorporated code from several C Chest Columns. If you got it from me, you got all of it, rather than the fragment that was actually published that month. (All of this additional code was available on CompuServe, by the way, but it was a pain to figure out what you needed and download that too). Finally, nobody ever complained to me about my distributing my own code, was Jon not giving me your letters? >> ...[We] would like to put him under a new contract...to >> write feature articles and reviews. That is, the same amount of work for less pay, and without the guarantee of a regular monthly income. I'd be paid only when feature articles were published, certainly not monthly. Reviews take a tremendous amount of time to do (relative to the final size of the article), and DDJ author payments are based on the number of words actually published. The "contract" was never discussed in any sort of serious way. If Jon was really interested in keeping me on the staff, surely he could have been less brutal in the way he canceled the column, he could have given me his reasons for canceling the column and let me respond to them, rather than forcing me to discover these reasons indirectly through a network posting several months later. He could have given me a copy of the contract that he was proposing. In any event, the issue of code distribution is not settled by this "new contract." Allen Holub holub@violet.berkeley.edu ...!ucbvax!violet!holub
gwyn@smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn ) (10/07/88)
Hey, what does all this have to do with C? Please find some other newsgroup or use mail. Thanks.
burgett@galaxy.COM (Michael Burgett) (10/07/88)
In article <15096@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> holub@violet.berkeley.edu () writes: >[ much delete text..... ] >download that too). Finally, nobody ever complained to me >about my distributing my own code, was Jon not giving me >your letters? maybe it was the compuserve sysops... I was last at the DDJ forum about a year ago, and there was much anger/resentment/flaming about the lack of C-chest sources available for download along with the rest of the magazine sources.... I think some of the Editors compuserve uid were handed out too, so some folks may have even written direct... They should have been forwarding that info to you. Mike Burgett
dg@lakart.UUCP (David Goodenough) (10/11/88)
In article <8648@smoke.ARPA>, by gwyn@smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn ) sez: > Hey, what does all this have to do with C? > Please find some other newsgroup or use mail. > Thanks. The title of Alan Holub's column sums it up. "C Chest" The point here is that I for one read (past tense) DDJ mainly for Alan's excellent articles, just as I read comp.lang.c / comp.unix.wizards for your, Chris Torek's, Henry Spencer's etc. etc. excellent postings. A lot of people (myself included) have found the behaviour of DDJ extremely unpleasant in this matter, to the point that my subscription (and at least 30 others that I have seen) have been cancelled. I agree that this discussion has little to do with writing in C directly, but I was under the impression that most newsgroups do tend to get a bit of posting that is relevant (maybe) but not in the same subject matter as the main thread of the group. There are times when I'd like to kill some people for inappropriate postings that linger on and on, but what I do is use vn, and skip articles by subject when I know I don't like that thread (for those without vn try the 'n' key from time to time :-) ). -- dg@lakart.UUCP - David Goodenough +---+ | +-+-+ ....... !harvard!xait!lakart!dg +-+-+ | AKA: dg%lakart@harvard.harvard.edu +---+