I'm assuming that if he asks them to, Archive.org will remove it from their archives?
Disclaimer: I don't know anything about Stepwise or the author, so hopefully I don't offend anyone.
Things like this and the disappearance of newmogul.com make me nervous about the ability of one individual to destroy knowledge on a whim. It might be useful to have offshore archive centers where it's harder to get rid of stuff like this. Yeah, I know this was the property of this one guy, and he has the right to destroy it, but something about it doesn't sit well. Sites like this seem to be a collection of knowledge from many different people, and it's a bit disconcerting to see it disappear overnight.
What if archive.org decided on a whim to disappear into the night? That's a lot of knowledge lost.
Maybe the answer is decentralized archival in general. Some kind of opt-in network where people agree to store a bit of the internet on their machine. Hmm...in fact, we already do this with caching. Maybe some kind of browser plugin that makes use of those cache files for decentralized archival purposes?
Sorry...rambling a bit. It's an interesting problem.
No apology necessary -- your rambling reminds me tangentially of Max Brod's decision to publish some of Kafka's writings after Kafka had explicitly asked him not to do so. The same question was at play -- whether one should interfere with the destruction of knowledge by its creator. Brod ended up publishing and for it we got Amerika, The Trial, and The Castle.
I can see arguments for both sides. Genius can be self-destructive and susceptible to manic episodes, and perhaps there's an argument where knowledge can forcibly be kept alive against its creator's will.
But it is his information, and as far as I can recall, its his right to get rid of it.
I don't understand why people feel the need to delete sites. _Why did this too, and I just don't get it.
I can understand shutting down the site. I can understand having new interests or priorities. But what I can't understand is why people can't just leave things in place with a disclaimer. This isn't 2001, bandwidth, hosting space, domain names, and disk space are all incredibly cheap. Why burn the bridge and scorch the earth behind you?
Though its not explicitly clear, from the explanation link posted below it seems as if he did this due to some sort of allegation(s) of copyright violation?
"Stepwise consisted of thousands of files. I didn't feel it was possible to locate and remove the files that were copyright by a single individual."
StepWise was THE site for NeXTSTEP / OpenStep. It had programming articles (many of which was useful into the OS X days) that taught a lot. I get the feeling a lot of OS X developers started there.
To me, what was more valuable than the articles hosted on the site, was the set of links to other articles and blog posts at the bottom of the home page. I found a lot of information there that made me a better developer.
I'm crossing my fingers that at least this section of the site returns some day.
I am confused. He didn't like that there was copyrighted material on the site and rather than attempt to remove it he just closed down the site? If the copyright holder didn't care, what did it matter?
I wonder if it any related to something that happened few years back where Rixstep was using some of the StepWise article and quotes form Scott to support its ramblings against Apple, I don't know the details but I know he was unhappy about it.
I'm assuming that if he asks them to, Archive.org will remove it from their archives?
Disclaimer: I don't know anything about Stepwise or the author, so hopefully I don't offend anyone.
Things like this and the disappearance of newmogul.com make me nervous about the ability of one individual to destroy knowledge on a whim. It might be useful to have offshore archive centers where it's harder to get rid of stuff like this. Yeah, I know this was the property of this one guy, and he has the right to destroy it, but something about it doesn't sit well. Sites like this seem to be a collection of knowledge from many different people, and it's a bit disconcerting to see it disappear overnight.
What if archive.org decided on a whim to disappear into the night? That's a lot of knowledge lost.
Maybe the answer is decentralized archival in general. Some kind of opt-in network where people agree to store a bit of the internet on their machine. Hmm...in fact, we already do this with caching. Maybe some kind of browser plugin that makes use of those cache files for decentralized archival purposes?
Sorry...rambling a bit. It's an interesting problem.