Tear down this wall
Thaler says, “But really, seriously, dude. The kid is cool. Don’t be like that. Don’t be a ZFS hater.” No one who reads our analysis in MWJ 2007.06.11 could possibly accuse us of hating ZFS.
Yes, but nobody read that analysis, because it is behind a pay wall; you can get a free trial subscription to read it, but nobody wants to do that either.
Of course, by “nobody”, I don’t mean literally zero people. Obviously, there are a few people with subscriptions, because otherwise MacJournals is not profitable. But it is irrational to assume that the entire internet should have read the article because you generously provide a free trial; most people, upon seeing your subscription wall, will say “fuck that” (or a cleaner equivalent) and move onto some other activity.
That’s assuming they even see a link to the walled-off article. I never did. The small (one-page) public article they had was the only one I saw.
October 8th, 2007 at 13:12:12
To be fair, both MDJ and MWJ have some of their more important past issues freely available to the intarwebs, but of course this doesn’t include the recent one with the ZFS analysis since it’s only a few months old. (The HFS Primer is an excellent issue.)
Unfortunately, it’s the age-old trade-off between what to offer for free and how to make money from subscribers so that you can afford to keep publishing the journal. MacFixIt does the exact same thing — any coverage that’s older than 2 days is behind their paywall. This is the only reasonable solution: making older news freely available and current news behind a paywall would be disastrous.
Also, I found that the ZFS article was well worth giving MacJournals my name, e-mail, and physical mailing address.