Back in mid-1997, your editor (Jonathan Corbet) and Liz Coolbaugh were engaged in a long-running discussion on how to trade our nice, stable, reliably paying jobs for a life of uncertainty, poverty, and around-the-clock work. Not that we thought of it in those terms, naturally. We eventually settled on joining Red Hat’s nascent “support partner” program; while we were waiting for it to get started, we decided to start a weekly newsletter as a side project — not big and professional like the real press — to establish ourselves in the community. Thus began an amazing journey that has just completed its 20th year.