Here’s an interesting concept: a magazine about open source in the enterprise that’s been put together using only open source software.
That’s the claim anyway. Given that there’s no print version, only a PDF version, I imagine they could just about put the whole thing together without needing a Mac; since The GIMP can’t handle CMYK and spot colours, it would have been tricky doing image editing anyway (there are plug-ins, I know, but they’re rudimentary at best. Any duotone as long as it’s red and black?).
There are two problems with it:
- It looks rubbish. That’s true of most US trade mags, but this has the design quality you’d expect of something put together with Microsoft Word. Two column layouts with a third, bastard column: fair enough. But if you put a subhead in the first column and don’t calculate the leading and spacing correctly, the second column’s baselines won’t match up, which is exactly what’s happened throughout. The designers appear only to be able to cope with pictures running over two columns, as well, turning most articles in swathes of impenetrable text. This is not a good advert for open source DTP software.
- The writing is awful. Most of the content is written by CTOs and techies and I fell asleep within seconds. For a magazine supposedly aimed at CIOs, there’s an amazingly large amount of material covering installing from source, the size of downloads and so on. And an article covering Boolean syntax in Google metadata searches? WTF?
Most trade mags get sent through the post, so require minimal effort on the part of the reader to obtain the latest edition. O3 may be free, but people will have to want to download it to read it. That’s not going to happen, based on this issue. Maybe it’ll find its feet with later issues, which is the usual pattern of most mags.
I suspect that O3 is either going to have a short lifespan or it’s going to have one of those slow, protracted deaths where people keep providing copy and working for nothing – the magazine keeps getting produced but the quality is so poor, no one ever reads it.