Check my account name against the author of the article :)

I appreciate your concern. I do occasionally post a subscriber link in a place like HN or reddit with the idea of sharing some useful news and making people aware of what we do. So you shouldn't be worrying about me abusing the LWN subscriber link mechanism (which I implemented in the first place); instead, you should worry about my shameless and transparent marketing efforts :)

Could you please comment on the appropriateness of other subscribers sharing a link like this?

Within certain bounds - glibc being a good example - the general interest in the article might justify its widespread use.

I would hazard a guess that for the majority of articles, LWN would prefer subscriber links be kept relatively "out of public circulation."

Thanks!

Keep in mind that the content stays behind the paywall for 1 week before non-subscribers can access it. So unless a paid subscriber is posting links to every single article, I don't think it's that much of an issue for LWN.

So given that it's really only subscribers-only for about 24 hours more(the original article was posted on March 28th, I don't think that LWN cares all that much.

That's why the share links where created.

When I share subscriber-only LWN content (which I do occasionally), I specifically call out the quality of the content and the fact that it's a subscription site. One of the few I actually do pay money to.

Thanks for sharing, that was an informative article! Well done.

> you should worry about my shameless and transparent marketing efforts :)

Which totally just worked on me, by the way.

As OP has pointed out, he's the LWN editor.

But besides that, LWN has a feature to allow sharing subscriber-only links for a reason. They want people to share those links and discuss them occasionally, as long as someone doesn't create an aggregator that posts all subscriber-only links. And all of the articles become public after a week, anyhow.

They are not trying to prevent people from discussing or reading articles; they are merely trying to encourage people to subscribe if they want to be able to see all of the subscriber-only content as soon as it's posted.

Can I just say that if you can subscribe, LWN is definitely worth every penny. It's everything a professional tech journal should be: detailed, topical, opinionated without being arbitrary, and consistently informative. They also do good deals on institutional subscriptions, which is useful if you want to talk to anybody else about what you've read :)

I think OP is LWN's editor!