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Notice: GeekPress is back up and running, thanks to Paul! It's still a not-so-serious tech news blog, but the format is significantly looser. Diana, having given up programming for philosophy, has her own philosophical blog NoodleFood. More of her work can be found at DianaHsieh.com.

 

Deja Revolt Against Google

3:20:17 pm mst / 21 February 2001 found by diana / filed in internet / source Wired 86 hits / 1 comment / 0 e-mails

Some open source advocates are concerned with Google's purchase of the Deja Usenet archives, and with good reason: Google has temporarily pulled the plug on all but the lastest eight months of the archive and has made searching rather difficult. These "Deja Refugees" are hoping to create an open-source, community-based Usenet archive called Delà.

Sounds like a great idea, if they can get the necesary hardware!

Comments

This comment board has been retired.

Open source archives good, Deja_Refugee bad: by MysteriousStranger 11:46:12 am mst / 22 February 2001 / # 1

I think the idea of an open source newsgroup archive project is great. I have tinkered with making my own searchable archive myself. But this Deja_Refugee guy is a big loser. Here is his actual article. He does not want to start an new open source project, he wants Google to hand over the archives gratis, that they just paid a bunch of cash for. I can't really claim to be an open source developer, but it seems to me that the spirit of open source should be "I made this cool thing, I don't mind sharing how I did it, do you want to help make it better?" But more and more it seems like open source means "somebody else ought to hand over their hard work for free". Screw that. And for what it's worth, I think Google is the best search engine out there, and they have always respected their users. Deja had been going downhill for a long time. I bet Google will restore the archive to something like its former glory, and maybe even better.