Wired has this article on the Google takeover of deja\’s archives. Google has temporarily taken the archive offline, and people are angry. They also believe that the coding that google is going to use for the database should be open source.
\”Some suggest the best place for the archives would be the Library of Congress. But one former Deja user wants to create an open-source, community-based Usenet archive and has asked Google to contribute the programming code of the old Deja service to the open-source community and give the project full access to the Usenet archive.\”
Wired has this article on the Google takeover of deja\’s archives. Google has temporarily taken the archive offline, and people are angry. They also believe that the coding that google is going to use for the database should be open source.
\”Some suggest the best place for the archives would be the Library of Congress. But one former Deja user wants to create an open-source, community-based Usenet archive and has asked Google to contribute the programming code of the old Deja service to the open-source community and give the project full access to the Usenet archive.\”
\”Google spokesman David Krane said that Google would consider making the Usenet archives available to an alternative archiving system, but he would not comment on whether the company would make the programming code accessible as well.\”
\”The proposed open-source archive project would be called Delà News, from the French expression \”deçà, delà,\” which roughly translates as \”hither-thither.\” The reference is to both the frequently wandering nature of Usenet discussions and the distributed nature of the project architecture.\”
\”The biggest obstacle to having a single non-commercial organization provide a searchable Usenet archive is the enormous amount of storage, computation and network resources that would be required; therefore, the archives would need to be housed on many servers.\”
The Delà News project has been launched by a programmer and network administrator who wants to stay anonymous until the project gets off the ground.\”
\”Citing open-source guru Eric Raymond\’s observation that the core open-source culture is quick to sniff out and ostracize chest-thumpers, Delà\’s progenitor wants to be known only as \”Deja Refugee.\”
\”I challenge Google to provide Deja\’s code and its oldest archives to the open-source community, and I urge others to echo that challenge,\” Deja Refugee said.
\”Whatever I have to say to people about the Deja issues, it\’s not about me, it\’s about the issues. I\’d like to see any related discussion remain focused on that,\” he said. \”The issues are the signal, and everything else is background noise.\”
\”A Delà News project page will soon be up on SourceForge, a hosting service for open-source development projects. In the meantime, interested parties can get more information by contacting Deja Refugee directly.\”
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