After 32 years, one of the ’Net’s oldest software archives is shutting down | Ars Technica
After 32 years, one of the ’Net’s oldest software archives is shutting down | Ars Technica
Hobbes OS/2 Archive: "As of April 15th, 2024, this site will no longer exist."
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Hope the Internet Archive can back it up, I guess.
IA is quickly becoming a massive, risky single point of failure that is one bad lawsuit away from causing a major problem.
I want to hope they have an exit strategy, but I'm thinking we need to start providing alternatives. A single backup is no backup at all, and all that.
You mean a lawsuit like the one about the "Great 78 Project" by the music companies or maybe the one about the "National Emergency Library" by the book publishers?
I think you're right that we need to start working on alternatives, hopefully something decentralized. The Wayback Machine would be an irreplaceable loss though if the data isn't preserved somehow.
Well, it's not the lawsuit that would trigger it, it's the outcome of it. So yes.
Yes on the other things, too. I can't imagine they would be opposed to working with alternatives to provide Wayback Machine fallbacks.
The Wayback Machine in particular is one of the greatest treasures of the Internet. An absolutely invaluable tool and so far entirely irreplaceable.
Honestly, it should be a public resource.
I mean, public libraries and archives being a mandatory requirement for copyright enforcement and publishing records is a thing, and the Wayback Machine proves it's technologically feasible to approximate it for the Internet, so...