tectonic - end of an era

i received an email yesterday from the tectonic team stating that they have had to stop publishing their magazine. this is a great pity, however i have really been getting into their email newsletter and am really glad that they will be able to concentrate on this. i can see good things coming from these guys in the future.

here's the letter in case you're curious...

Dear Tectonic reader

Free Speech Publishing cc, the publisher of Tectonic Magazine,
regrets to announce that it has decided to discontinue publication of
the magazine.

The decision to close Tectonic Magazine is not one we wanted to make
nor a decision we took lightly. The encouragement and positive
response from readers has consistently exceeded our expectations and
has made us proud of the magazine and glad that we could play a role
in the growth of free and open source software in South Africa.
Unfortunately the financial burden of producing and distributing the
magazine has made its continuation unsustainable.

The Tectonic.co.za website will, however, continue to operate and
with renewed focus is expected to continue its exponential growth.

The website has grown from strength to strength and today boasts more
than 75 000 unique readers a month, serving up almost half a million
pages and receiving 1.7 million hits a month.

With the website growing exponentially and the financial strain
placed upon us by the high cost of running a magazine, a decision was
made to halt production on the magazine and focus on the website.
Since we are a small operation, running both simultaneously was not
doing justice to either publication.

We concluded that although our readership was ready for a magazine
focused on open source in the marketplace, the advertisers are not
yet ready to support open source. We would like to thank those
advertisers who did support us, including Sybase, the Team Linux
cycling team (Oracle, Intel and Dell), African Legend Indigo,
OpenVoice, Tangent Systems, SevenC Computing, SmartSource,
LinuxWorld, Linux Holdings, Lead, Impi Linux, Yellow Penguin, Synaq,
Amppol IT, OpenLab, Connection Telecom, Go Open Source, Obsidian
Systems and Intoweb.

We will continue to assess the marketplace and may revive the
publication in some form in the future. Until then, we would like to
thank our loyal readership and ask you for your continued support of
the Tectonic web site.

We do ask that all subscribers who paid for a subscription after May
2006 please contact us so we can arrange a suitable refund with you.

Kind regards
Alastair and Jason