Slashdot Mirror
Remirroring Mark Pilgrim's Sites
First time accepted submitter ServerCobra writes "Last week, Mark Pilgrim 'pulled down his popular 'Dive Into...' sites. I remirrored a couple of them, because they are far too helpful and important to lose. DiveIntoPython.net, DiveIntoPython3.net, and DiveIntoHTML5.net."
was this done with his permission? He presumably holds the copyright, and took them down for reasons apparently only known to himself.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I see a generic Copyright notice below, though other licenses are scattered throughout.
So how is this not food for the Copyright brigade?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
It's the ultimate backup.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
http://diveintohtml5.info/table-of-contents.html
Domain Name:DIVEINTOHTML5.INFO
Created On:05-Oct-2011 03:34:16 UTC
Domain: diveintohtml5.net
Registration Date: 2011-10-10
The license those "Dive Into..." sites use explicitly allows exactly this sort of mirroring - so I can't see Mark Pilgrim raising a ruckus.
It sounds like he didn't just pull down those sites - he's removed pretty much every piece of his web-based presence. I can understand that - although he has given no explanation for his actions, I know from experience (albeit on a much smaller scale) when you put informational documents online for free the support demands made by the wider world can be pretty overwhelming. If he chose to throw up his hands and say "enough!", I can't blame him. But I am glad someone is taking action to keep these resources available while following the intent stated by the original author.
#DeleteChrome
I remember bookmarking his Python pages online, and I thought to myself, "Awesome, this is, like, the future, man. I'm not going to download it all and keep a hard copy, I can just access it anytime. The future is, like, now, dude." Wholly my own fault, but I feel strangely... weird. My cloud-faith is... shaken. Maybe I should start printing out all my emails like it's 1993...
...back up locally.
Google essentially already has their own "dive into" site. See HTML5 rocks.
He can have his privacy. It's the useful stuff that he released under a CC license that permits this very sort of mirroring that everybody wants.
By pulling everything down suddenly and serving 410s, Mark Pilgrim appears to have turned to a life of dickery. He's well within his right to stop supporting the things he's created just as much as it is his right to take down his blog and personal websites. It's this inexplicable move to deny distribution to the public the code and knowledge he has previously relinquished exclusive control over.
As far as I'm concerned, he can move up to Montana, live in a hunting lodge, and spend the rest of his life writing an anti-technology manifesto. His last act on the Internet, though, makes him look like a jackass.
Don't know about the rest of the 'Dive Into...' sites, but the world may be actually better off without the Python site, if we are to believe this blog:
"Beginners see this and think that Python is complex and hard when it's actually one of the few languages designed to be easy to use. It's a damn shame they run into this book first.
(...)
This is for a first program? When beginners are told "go read Dive Into Python" they run into examples like this and get discouraged. I could see if Mr. Pilgrim had a giant disclaimer or something warning people that this isn't a beginner's book, but he doesn't. In fact, he has a whole damn chapter on installing Python 3 as if it's for a beginner.
This book is so full of bad initial examples and difficult to follow instructions that it actually hurts Python to have it exist. When beginners stumble onto it they end up getting discouraged and go on to another language. I personally have had too many friends who are eager to learn programming find this festering dung pile before I could warn them and get turned off from programming.
Just because you release something under a permissive license doesn't mean you have to host the content forever. If people wanted a copy of the content, it's their own responsibility to mirror it.
Just because you release something under a permissive license doesn't mean you have to host the content forever. If people wanted a copy of the content, it's their own responsibility to mirror it.
There is nothing illegal about what he did, he can do whatever he wants with his own website. But doing it without any notice is still a jackass move. Being a jackass isn't illegal, but it is what it is.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Maybe I am crazy, but I am pretty sure he did this once before. He just vanished, and I believe the original Dive into Python went with him. Eventually he showed up again, but just his sites and occasional posts here and there, rather than as a fairly regular blogger. Then more activity and eventually DiP3 and DiH5, and now this.
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
I run a site that catalogs books that have intentionally been made free by their authors (see my sig). By far the majority of such books are just free-as-in-beer, not free-as-in-speech.
The half-life of the free-as-in-beer books seems to be something like 5 years. That's about how long it typically takes before the author takes them down off the web, and they are lost forever. (This is not just like a printed book going out of print. These books are typically not sitting around in libraries. That means they're as lost as a lost play by Aristophanes.)
Free-as-in-beer books are different. The beautiful thing about copyleft licensing is that once you provide the world with the gift of a piece of copylefted information, it's free forever. It basically doesn't matter at all that Mark Pilgrim has taken down his web site. Because his books are free-as-in-speech, his valuable contributions to the digital commons are still out there, making people's lives better.
We would all be a lot richer if more people could be convinced of what a good thing copyleft licenses are. When it comes to books, the problem seems to be that people underestimate how hard it is to do commercially successful writing. They have this illusion that they're going to make all kinds of money from their wonderful book, and they see copyleft licensing as being incompatible with that. The hard truth is that even a good, well-written book is seldom significantly profitable.
Find free books.
I'll go download Mendel Cooper's bash programming guide I've used countless times, just in case.
http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/
wow, my very own sig!
A torrent with no seeds is worthless.
Multiple web mirrors are more robust for this type of information, and since it's legal, more people are going to step forward to run them.
I find it a bit troubling, almost worrying, that he all of a sudden wanted to kill any mention of himself online
And yet a lot of slashdotters love the idea of living off the grid, avoiding the evil government, not paying taxes and living like the central character in a paranoid conspiracy thriller story.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it