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.
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? =)
Looking back on 10 years of doing this, what would classify as your greatest success, and your greatest failure?
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?
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
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
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?
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.
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.
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suwain_2
Over the past ten years, what has been the most personally rewarding part of your work?
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.
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...)