Slashdot Mirror
Ask About 10 Years of Free Web Publishing
This week's Slashdot questions go to Paul Jones, director of ibiblio.org (formerly MetaLab, before that SunSITE) since it first went live in August, 1992. Ibiblio hosts the world's largest Linux archive (including the LDP), plenty of streamed and downloadable music, the world's longest-running Web cartoon (Dr. Fun), and thousands of texts on topics too numerous to list here. This is truly "the public's library and digital archive," 100% GPL, copyleft, and/or public domain, sponsored jointly by the Center for the Public Domain and UNC. Lots of people talk about free online publishing. Paul Jones just does it, day after day, year after year. Ask him whatever you want; we'll send 10 of the highest moderated questions to him and post his answers as soon as we get them back.
One question:
WHY?
With all the time you can put into something like kernel hacking, why would you make ibiblio?
Needed something to do while your GNU/Beard grew in?
Has he figured out how to monetize it yet? Thousands of former, failed Geek Business execs would like to know! Their attempts at "Free Web Publishing" led them to financial failure.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
DRM? Palladium?
What's your take on these two technologies?
Are you afraid they'll ultimately destroy what you have been working for, for the past 10 years? If not, why?
Optional question: What about the copyright extension we have seen?
Another optional question: Linux... or BSD? =)
How does you keep this thisg going with add revenues on the decline?
Kal
Ahh.. The mind what a wonderful trap!
Looking back on 10 years of doing this, what would classify as your greatest success, and your greatest failure?
to each page of free content, what will you do to publishers who try to disable the pop-up ads?
The shareholder is always right.
Personally I'd really like to know what the difference in bandwidth usage, hits, cost, and other boring logistical statistics the site produces are...
*HOW* many gigs per day, HOW much cost per day, how many people download the latest linux ISO on their cable/dsl just because they can?
Sunsite (as I'll forever call it) isn't just a measure of the pulse of linux penetration, it's been the heart of it for me over the years. -_-()
What is the center's view on the publishing of material that might be considered "offensive" or "dangerous", and does the center make subjective judgements upon the importance of one piece of intellectual property over another on the basis of 'artistic worth', 'decency', etc.? With only limited resources available to promote the archiving of data, is there the risk that important fringe documents may be left by the wayside, or ignored due to political/social concerns?
Have you ever considered approaching the government for some grant money? If so, would there be icky strings attached that make it counterproductive?
This isn't meant to be a troll.. but, UNC refers to the University of North Carolina system.
There is more than one school in the UNC System, other than UNC Chapel Hill (though those attending UNC Chapel Hill might not want to believe it).
Please don't refer to UNC Chapel Hill as simply UNC.. what is this, a report on basketball?
My only experience with Ibiblio is via Project Gutenberg, so maybe you're the wrong person to ask, but I'm troubled by some of PG's design decisions, and wonder if you can throw any light on them:
- the preference for ascii over html (I've seen a few cases lately where html-versions were offered too-- will this be the future policy?)
- the annoying pages of smallprint at the start
- the 'server indirection' that requires a decision *every single time* of which server to use
- the absence (or obscure placement) of basic bibliographic info like publication-date
It seems like these choices were made several generations ago, in Internet Time, so I hope they're all being reconsidered?
What do you do for revenue? Most free hosting services are plauged with crappy obtrusive ads and pop up/under windows that annoy me to no end. I try to avoid these sites (ie geocities/angelfire) however you don't have much in the way of ads, how to you have any capital?? (and if you wouldn't mind telling the slashdot editors maybe they can remove some of the larger ads on the site...
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
What's your most requested pieces of content?
Which ones get the most traffic?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
One of the things that people frequently ask about sites like ibiblio.org
is "They are great. But how long will they be around?"
Do you see this as a concern (esp. after the LWN announcement) and do you have any
comments regardning this. Are there any good approaches you suggest (like augmenting
free usership with voluntary subscriptions, etc) for such free sites in general ?
Thanks.
DO NOT PANIC
In general how supportive have you found the producers of such content to be of your services? Do many if any really believe that something like this will cause them to starve to death?
It's amazing how spiritual an elaborated beer commercial can be. -- Philip K. Dick
How similar are your efforts to what archive.org is doing?
example.org - powered by Linux!
What's your backup strategy? I imagine it's hard to deal with both so much data as well being under constant bombardment from clients around the world. How often is data archived? Have you had any major data loss incidents and, if so, how well were you able to deal with them?
What's step 2?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
From everything I've read, you sound like a very busy person. How do you manage your time? Do you have any time management tips or advice?
_______
2B1ASK1
go write ahead, & post your secret directory permission, & how2 recipes, while the rest of US become FraUDuleNT stock markup billyunheirs again buy nitefall, following the gooed advice of father billyum, & his newest gopher boy, george.
pathetic hobbyist loosers, you'll never make IT.
Where do I send the cheque?
Is Doctor Fun the oldest comic on the Internet?
No. That would be "Where the Buffalo Roam" by Hans Bjordahl. "Where the Buffalo Roam" started in 1991, and had its own Usenet group long before Doctor Fun came along, and is still running on the web.
You host a slew of subgenius content, so it must be asked ... do you have slack?
Slashdot? Oh, I just read it for the articles.
I don't call "Le Marquis de Sade" 's books fringe documents!
Exactly where did he call them fringe documents?
I've been using ibiblio for a long time, back long ago when it was still SunSITE and now I read through your feature articles which I think many times are top notch. One thing I have noticed about the entire project however is how much support you have from various organizations. That sort of baseline support coupled with the ideals of public domain and free as in speech information are what I think makes ibiblio so awesome. However it this leads to my mainquestion, how replicatable is the ibiblio project.
I think ibiblio HAS to be as large of a project as it is because it is one of so few projects of a similar nature. How unique is your organization's situation in terms of third party support? Not everyone can exactly plop down and decide to run a massive network dedicated to freedom of information and dissemination. Outside of university CS departments there's little support for the sort of information ibiblio propogates, I think the next largest group in that arena would be the OSDN network. A large part of any organization's focus and drive is going to be the people involved, obviously the people you have have working on your poject aren't replicatable but thereare like minded folk in the world. Besides the personal specifics of your group how replicatable is the ibiblio project? Is it something any dedicated group of individuals could accomplish if they set out to do it or did it require the right people at the right place at the right time with the Sun at a particular angle to happen?
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
As I'm on the BSD side of things nearly all the time, I'd find it fairly interesting to know like, what are your machine stats, download stats, etc. Do you run BSD, Linux, or something else? What hardware? How much trafic?
If you could do one thing in your live differently what would it be?
Of course this is a somewhat generic and personal question, but people can have very interesting answers to this question...
My Stuff: pspChess and foobar2000 plugins
As a webmaster of a few non-profit websites myself, I would like to know how you raise money for all the bandwidth charges you incur. Or if you are recieving bandwidth donations from organizations, how do you go about contacting such people & inquiring about bandwidth donations.
I noticed that you are one of the founders of the American Open Technology Consortium and/or GeekPAC - the lobbying group that got a bit of fanfare a few months back when it was formed, but has been pretty quiet since then.
With Congress launching seemingly daily attacks on our technological freedom in order to support the revenue models of a few huge businesses, the need for a voice in Washington is growing urgent. Is the AOTC/GeekPAC working to get our voices heard? Is there a need for an umbrella group to tie together various groups like GeekPAC, Public Knowledge, Digital Consumer, etc.?
Since this is such a great archive and service of everything that is free, what would we all do if this service ceased to exist?
The greatest right given is the right to be wrong...
With all of this material, can you help me find a good question to ask you? I'm sure there has to be a a good source for posting on /. in there somewhere.....
You zap the moderators with a wand of humor! The moderators resist!
Who pays for all that traffic, and why?
When the radio, television, cars and countless other technologies were first developed, anyone with access to the technology could use it for whatever purpose without any hassles aside from those presented by the technology itself. When new, radio/television content was provided by anyone with something to communicate. In time, licencing, increasing costs of use and other factors were introduced that presented barriers to entry for the enthusiast. Radio and television have since become read-only media.
By fluke or by design, similar barriers are going up around the internet. Bandwidth costs money, overzealous IP lawyers, new laws and a miriade of other factors are starting to inhibit the enthusiasts ability to write on this medium.
With large business and government seeking to control the internet as it does other media, how long to you anticipate the internet remaining a read-write technology for the home user?
What steps to raise funding have you undertaken in this time of state budget constraints, given the enormous resources that are devoted to running this site?
How do you maintain such a big site full of public domain? How do you pay for all that stuff?
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
...feed yourself? I've always looked upon these great altruistic projects with envy. I would love to offer my services in a similar vein. The question that I cannot surpass is how do you make ends meat?
How much money do you make per year? Where does it come from?
If you mind the specific questions about renumeration, a ball-park range would be just as interesting.
Thanks for a great project and your time.
Do you see any avenue for cutting cost and improving availability using peer to peer technologies? Particularly, systems which are self-certifying (i.e. filename == md5 checksum of the file) would seem to offer some promise for huge distributed storage, but centralized indexing.
Is this an area worth persuing, in your opinion?
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
I've downloaded my share of things, and find that the 3 Mbps cap on my cable modem is almost always my bottleneck. So my question is fairly simple (albeit broad) -- can you describe your setup a bit, in terms of bandwidth (both what you have for an Internet connection, and how much traffic you actually use), servers, storage (I'd venture to guess it's to the tune of several terabytes?), etc.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
I don't even see any of Marquis de Sade's works on the site.
Over the past ten years, what has been the most personally rewarding part of your work?
What do you think about Slashdot?
iBiblio stands out as an excellent repository for a wide range of culturally valuable resources. As it and other sites grow in size, the importance of good searching and indexing becomes extremely relevant. Have you given any thought to how you might want to cope with this? Specifically, are there any metadata schemata that you are considering using? I would love to see iBiblio be used more like a content feed to research/cross-referencing applications.
What about the files that ibiblo holds the copyright to? Anyone offer money to take them private? Or to take the site private?
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
I heard you talk at the Southern Presses conference last year about the use of trust metrics (like Slashdot's karma and Advogato's peer certification) as a possible alternative to the "top-down" means of filtering that scholarly and commercial publishers use, namely formal peer review and mass marketing, respectively. Are you more or less optimistic about the long-term viability of this model then you were then? (Especially in light of the powerful efforts to keep control of the gates we're seeing these days from Hollywood, the recording industry, and their political allies...)
Oh, wait. That's the same thing.
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
Looking at the archive for the first time, I fail to see what is unique about this. Most of the material is copyrighted, including the cartoons. What am I missing?
Surrender .org, Slashdot! You bastards! You should be slashdot.com!
From its initial inception as SUNsite.unc.edu to the current incarnation as ibiblio.org, what have been the major changes and upgrades the site has seen, with respect to servers, redundancy, architecture, and storage? What were the factors that led to your decisions?
-- lk t lv ll th vwls t f wrds. T svs lts f tm t wrt bt ts pn n th ss t rd nd mks m lk lk cmplt dpsht.
Sometimes I see portage (gentoo) hitting ibiblio for source files. Some things never change...
Where is the public domain pr0n?
http://windows.scares.us
Are you happy that your work helped kill off Gopher? Well, are you?!?!?!
The philosopher Daniel Dennett put it simply: "Information is the one commodity which can be given away and kept at the same time."
To what extent is the ibiblio community idealistically motivated towards the future "free-ing" of all published works?
To what extent is the community motivated by the possibility of future profit?
I'm trying to build a net radio station that is totally free and redistributable. I use free software (linux, icecast, liveice) to broadcast music, and only broadcast music that is licensed to the public under the EFF's Open Audio License, OpenMusic.com's Open Music License or even the GPL. I broadcast 100 songs by 10 artists, 24/7. Not the most exciting playlist, but it's up and running.
Of course I'd like to find more music to play that is already under these licenses (I've scoured openaudioregistry.org, but other suggestions welcome), but I'm also trying to convince artists, both friends and strangers, to release the music on these licenses. Usually, a band has a web-site or posts their music to mp3.com and they advertise it as "free!", but after a couple of emails, it's clear that the artists don't use free in the same way I do. Most of the artists that I talk to have either forgotten, or have never encountered, the idea of art truly free to the public. When I describe the ideas of public domain, copyright, licensing, etc. their eyes glaze over (you actually can see it over email!) and they inform me that they hate "lawyer talk".
Given your experience, maybe you can offer some insight here.
How do you appeal to an artist to take their hard work and donate it to the public and in a meaningfully legal way?
Guilty conscience?
http://ibiblio.org/Dave/index.html
http://ibiblio.org/Dave/index.html has been categorized as Sex Education.
It has been blocked per your organization's Internet Usage Policy.
If you feel you have reached this page in error, please contact your
System Administrator.
What do you forsee as the likelihood of a subscription model adaptation for most web sites? With companies like ZDNet, Salon and many other news/article web sites falling under due to lack of money for a) bandwidth and b) writers salary, a subscription model tends to lend itself very favourably since it actually incorporates a source of income beyond advertising - which has proven to be a flop on the Internet. Do you see a subscription model taking reign over many of our favorite free sites in the future?
To make a pun demonstrates the highest understanding of a language
How do you go about finding and retaining technical people without the promise of high salary or even stock options? Along the same lines, how do you deal with the misanthropic and/or egomaniacal employees that bedevil every IT manager?
Why?
Wherever you go, there you are!
Let me start by saying that I've used sunsite/metalab/ibiblio quite a bit over the years and really appreciate the service.
I've always wondered about data integrity, how do you handle this for your archive? Also, I've noticed that download speeds from your site seem to have decreased in the past year, do you have any stats or info on this?
Your site has provided free access to linux and open source software for several years. Has there ever been any external pressure applied from interests that might not be happy to see the spread of open source free software?
Search results for "hot girl on girl action":
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My question is two-fold: What are you going to do to fix this? Also, would donating the use of my bed help?
Just wait till some crappy band steals your nic.
Ibiblio was around long before most dot com's and has outlived most of them as well. Aside from a few name changes, it has stayed true to its roots.
Given the way the dot-com bust has changed the Internet landscape, would something like Ibiblio still be possible today? How has the Internet changed since Ibiblio was created?
10 years is a long time for one to understand the intricacies of the trade. You have been associated with ibiblio for so long, you have seen so many transitions in the industry (dot com boom, the growth of linux, M$ and its anti trust, the visa restrictions so on and so forth). ibiblio has continued unfazed, so what do you forsee is the future of web publishing, both in terms of commercial and a personal interest ?
thank you
how would you reform copyright?