https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1034849/9d882570bf481339/
"The Internet is a wonderful thing; it allows anybody to look up information of
interest. Included in all of that is the history of the free-software
development community; how we got to where we are says a lot about why things
are the way they are and what might come next. So the takeover of
Groklaw
rings a loud alarm; we have been reminded that history stored on the Internet
is an ephemeral thing and cannot be expected to remain available forever.
Some of our younger readers may not remember what an important resource
Groklaw was during a crucial time in our history. Pamela Jones and those who
helped her chronicled the ups and downs of the SCO lawsuit, keeping us all
informed of what was going on, digging up information that was useful for the
defense, and teaching us all a great deal about how the US legal process works.
Groklaw did not stop there, though; it was an irreplaceable source of
information on software patents, standards, licensing, and more. It was truly
one of the key community resources for many years.
The site was important enough that
LWN's history contains over 800 articles
and comments with links to almost 700 pages on
Groklaw.
Unfortunately,
Groklaw has now been taken over by somebody whose priorities
differ strongly from those of the site's founder. As of this writing,
Groklaw
has become a platform for the promotion of crypto products. The text of some
original articles remains (though decorated with crypto ads) while other
articles have been replaced entirely. An important part of the free-software
community's history (and that of the commercial realm around it) has been
compromised.
The usual policy at
LWN is to not attempt to keep up with link rot. Our
history runs back to 1998; if we tried to keep up with all of things we have
linked to over those years, we would never have the time to do anything else.
But finding ourselves to be hosting hundreds of once-important links that now
lead to a crypto scammer's site presents a bit of a special case. We have thus,
over the last week, replaced every Groklaw link we could with an equivalent
link into the Internet Archive. In the end, there were only a half-dozen links
that were not archived.
This episode is an important reminder of what can happen to any Internet
resource that we depend on. Web sites will only persist for as long as somebody
is willing to care (and pay) for them. Certain governments are currently doing
their best to disappear inconvenient information from the net — information
that others depend on heavily. An era where everything is digital is an era
where important history can disappear at any time and, increasingly, it does.
In this case, the Internet Archive has come to the rescue, proving its value
once again. But the Internet Archive is a single point of failure, and one that
is under attack at that; it, too, could disappear someday. It is not, by
itself, a convincing solution to this problem."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
