[comp.lang.c] Response to Alan Holub's Last Column

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		+---+
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AKA:	dg%lakart@harvard.harvard.edu		  	  +---+