It was nine years ago today that I made my very first post at LQ. 3,578,611 posts and 407,152 members (note: we prune inactive members – more than 480,000 members have signed up) later, I continue to be astounded by what LQ has become. As I’ve stated many times, the site has grown well beyond my initial expectations. If you’d have told me in 2000 that I’d be traveling around the world, from London to San Francisco, evangelizing Linux and Open Source on behalf of LQ… well, let’s just say I wouldn’t have believed you. I started LQ as a way to give something back to a community that I felt had given to me. I wanted LQ to be a place that was friendly and welcoming those who were new to Open Source and Linux. Despite our ever growing size, I think we’ve maintained that objective. With an absolutely great group of members and the best mod team on the net, we’ve only just begun however. From the very beginning, LQ has thrived on member feedback. That will never change. Visit this LQ thread to let us know how you think we’re doing. We want to know what we’re doing well and where we can improve. We really do listen closely to feedback and many of the improvements we’ve made over the years were direct responses to member suggestions. I’d like to once again thank each and every LQ member. It really is the members that make the site what it is. Here’s to another nine years!
–jeremy
Random stat: In our ninth year on the net, well over 25,000,000 unique visitors came to LQ.
I’m happy to announce that we’re able to give one full “Sessions Only” pass to OSCON away absolutely free. For those of you who’ve never attended OSCON, it’s always a great event. While the event is in San Jose and not Portland this year, I still expect a top notch showing from O’Reilly. At almost $1,500 the “Sessions Only” pass will get you into everything except for the tutorials. Visit this LQ thread for more information on how to be eligible for the free pass. I’d like to thank O’Reilly for making this possible. See you in San Jose.
–jeremy
(via David A. Wheeler) The proposed change that the copyright licensing terms on the wikis operated by the WMF – including Wikipedia, be changed to include the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) license in addition to the current GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) has been approved. From the official results:
If “no opinion” votes are not included, the Yes/No percentage becomes 87.9%/12.1% (15071 votes).
This impacts us at LQ due to its implications to the LQ Wiki. We recognized the desire to license content CC-BY-SA some time ago and added that as an additional option as a result. With this Wikipedia change it’s likely we’ll do the research needed to offer the same dual licensing option that the WMF now offers. Stay tuned.
–jeremy
While LQ has been on the various social networks since the beginning, we’re finally starting to use them all regularly. If you’re not already following LQ, here are the relevant links.
Twitter: @linuxquestions
identi.ca: @linuxquestions
Facebook: @linuxquestions
We should have a Facebook app coming soon. If there’s something specific you’d like to see, let us know.
–jeremy
I’m in San Francisco for the 3rd annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit. I wasn’t able to attend the event last year, but I was at the introductory Summit and really enjoyed it. I know this blog has been quiet in the recent past, but posting frequency should return to normal moving forward.
–jeremy
I’ll be heading to Los Angeles for the weekend to attend the Southern California Linux Expo. I’ve tried to make SCaLE a yearly trip and it’s one of my favorite Linux conferences. If you’ll be anywhere near LA February 20-22, I encourage you to stop by the Westin LAX. If you do make it to SCaLE, be sure to stop by the dotorg section of the expo floor and visit the LQ booth (#35). See you in sunny southern California.
–jeremy
I like to post random LQ stats every once and a while, and here are the browser and OS statistics for the main LQ site for all of 2008.
| Browsers |
| Firefox |
64.44% |
| Internet Explorer |
21.48% |
| Mozilla |
4.97% |
| Opera |
4.09% |
| Safari |
2.20% |
| Konqueror |
1.58% |
It’s interesting to me that Firefox versions are all over the place, with no single version having over 14%. The top 5 are: 3.0.1, 3.0, 3.0.3, 2.0.0.14 and 2.0.0.12.
| Operating Systems |
| Windows |
53.23% |
| Linux |
41.59% |
| Macintosh |
4.38% |
–jeremy
It’s that time once again. Voting for the 2008 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards is now open. The Members Choice Awards allow the Linux community to select their favorite products in a variety of categories. This is now the eighth year we’ve done the MCA’s, and we try to improve the polls every year. It involves striking a tough balance between having too many awards and having nominees in certain categories that quite simply are not directly comparable. There are 26 categories this year, and as always we’re open to feedback on how we can improve next year. We always pre-announce the categories to get feedback and then post the nominees a few days before the polls open, to ensure we can add any apps we may have missed. Congratulations to all those who were nominated and good luck! The polls will close on February 12th. Vote Now!
–jeremy
On behalf of myself and LinuxQuestions.org I’d like to wish everyone a very happy new year. As the year comes to an end, it’s a great time to reflect on the year that passed and look forward to the year ahead. 2008 was another great year for LQ. We continue to roll out additional features a new functionality, while staying true to our core goals. This year we added almost 70,000 new members and over 400,000 new posts to the site. LQ ISO has now facilitated over 7.5 Million Linux downloads. I’m happy to report that in 2009 we have plans that should provide continued growth and further stability. We remain committed to remaining one of the friendliest and most active Linux communities on the web. It’s been a wild 8 and a half years – here’s to another great one.
I’d also like to take this time to thank each and every LQ member. You are what make the site great.
–jeremy
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