This magazine was inspired by a conversation I had with a great friend of mine called Massimo. I said to Massimo “I think it would be great to start a magazine. It’s my ideal job, and I think I know what the world needs right now. It’s a pity there’s no money in publishing, and I’m not willing to run a magazine that doesn’t pay it’s contributors well…”. His answer was very simple: “Tony, there’s money everywhere, as long as you do something good and promote it well”. Well, seeing that he has a successful business, I thought I would listen. And it’s thanks to him that you are reading this article right now.

A few months ago, just before my conversation with Massimo, I realised that the world needed a magazine on free software. My ideal magazine would be aimed at IT professionals (the techs ) as well as managers.

Massimo said “Tony, there’s money everywhere, as long as you do something good and promote it well” Well, seeing that he has a successful business, I thought I would listen

The magazine would contain technical articles, but they would be focused on describing the possibilities of free software, rather than the technical details of how to configure a specific server. It would also publish technical articles on software patents, copyright laws, and how the world is changing thanks to free software. Above all, it wouldn’t be yet another technical Linux magazine (there are plenty of them at the moment) and it wouldn’t compete with Linux magazines. It would also break the common rules for magazines of this kind, and contain a fiction section—short stories about the new technological era.

This magazine would pay its authors well, and would release all the articles under a free license.

A few months ago, after talking to Massimo, I decided that I would do it—and I have.

Starting up

When starting a magazine from scratch, the first concern is creating an appropriate structure to support the project (an office, the staff for the magazine’s composition, the managing editor, the web designer, etc).

I have been working on magazines my whole life. I am aware of all the processes involved, and I know that if I had followed the “normal” path, I would have needed a lot of capital to start the project, and a lot of advertisers and subscribers to keep it going. Seeing as Free Software Magazine would attract a restricted audience (we are not Cosmopolitan or Playboy…), such a structure would have been far too expensive.

There is also the technological side of the story. I wasn’t willing to accept that Free Software Magazine (I will call it “FSM” from now on) would need a compositor to actually make up the magazine by hand for every issue. The manual composition of a magazine and the subsequent quality checks take phenomenal amounts of time and money (for a while I was the man who checked that the all the captions were correct, all the borders aligned, and so on for another magazine). Also, I wasn’t willing to accept that in order to create FSM I would need proprietary software (I discovered later that I’d have to give in on this one, but only marginally and temporarily).

I wasn’t willing to accept that Free Software Magazine would need a compositor to actually make up the magazine _by hand_ for every issue

A magazine that talks about free software and solutions had to be set up in such a way that composition simply wouldn’t be needed: the magazine’s PDF and HTML versions would have to be generated automatically, providing the articles as input.

Well, I can now say (and not without immense satisfaction, and a sigh of relief): we did it.

The system we created can now take an article written using OpenOffice or Microsoft Word (using the right styles), and generate the XML version—as well as an extremely professional looking PDF file.

It has been an up-hill struggle. I have designed the whole system, coordinated the amazing people who wrote various components, and coded a great deal of it myself. It has been hard. I have sent and received more than two thousand emails for this project. But in the end, we did it. The system is here, and we are now using it for the real “Issue 0” that I am writing right now.

The initial technical planning: XML

A magazine is a collection of articles. Deciding the format for the articles was, in my opinion, one of the most crucial steps of the project—everything else would depend on it. Getting it wrong could have compromised the project’s success.

The choice went automatically to XML: it’s a language that allows you to define your own file format; it has existing, powerful tools (such as XSLT and XPATH) for converting data into HTML and other formats; it is supported by every platform on this planet; and (which is quite important as well) I had worked on it before, even though it had been a while.

But it’s not enough to say, “I’ll use XML files”, there’s still all the design work that needs to be done.

XML lets you decide what tags (or, more correctly, entities) you will use in your mark-up file. You normally do this by writing your DTDs (or more modern schemas). But this decision is an important one, as it’s very easy to design an XML structure that simply doesn’t work properly. What’s worse, you may discover the problem further down the track, when changing a detail in the XML file generates a chain reaction that explodes into many, many hours of work.

This is why the first thing I had to decide was: do I want to use an existing, established DTD, or shall I define my own?

I did my research, which was crippled by my limited knowledge of XML; I looked into other systems that dealt with similar issues, but they all looked too complex or boring to me.

I wanted a simple, lightweight XML structure that would contain exactly what I needed—after all, if XML was a way to store information intelligently, who could decide what information to store better than me? I had worked in the industry long enough to know what information I needed for each article. So, I designed it.

I did my research, which was crippled by my limited knowledge of XML; I looked into other systems that dealt with similar issues, but they all looked too complex or boring to me

Well, I did it with the help of Michael Eastwood, who has three fantastic qualities: he’s a genius, he knows XML very well, and he’s a graphic designer. Michael did a lot more than help me with XML: he designed the initial web site, and wrote the XSLT transformations to translate articles into HTML (Michael said from the beginning that it would be up to me to set the XML structure).