Remirroring Mark Pilgrim's Sites 46
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."
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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 r
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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.
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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.
And... (Score:3)
Re:And... (Score:5, Informative)
The Work shall remain online under the CC-BY-3.0 License
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Where does it say that he is acting "butthurt?" So he took down his website/information... Not a big deal since the information was licensed so that others could put up their own copies of that information. As far as I know he isn't threatening anyone and frankly having a website requires a certain amount of maintenance even if it's just a static website. I've had several of them over the years and have taken them down just because I don't want to continue to monitor them weekly or monthly to insure
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As evidenced by the licenses they were released under, yes.
Copyright? (Score:2)
I see a generic Copyright notice below, though other licenses are scattered throughout.
So how is this not food for the Copyright brigade?
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From the book [diveintopython.net]:
Offer a .torrent (Score:2)
It's the ultimate backup.
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A copyleft licence is better.
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Well, let's say that if you offer a torrent, an open licence is somewhat implied, isn't it ? And given an open license, a well-seeded torrent will allow good availability.
Back in the real world... (Score:2)
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.
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Except you didn't specify web mirrors. You specified a copy left license.
Presuming web mirrors that are persistent and accessible to all is a much bigger leap than presuming a torrent with at least one seed that connects periodically.
And either way, the torrent itself certifies that someone has (or had) a copy of the original at one point in time.
A license does not ensure a copy ever existed.
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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.
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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.
Someone else put up Dive into HTML 5 already.. (Score:2)
http://diveintohtml5.info/table-of-contents.html [diveintohtml5.info]
Domain Name:DIVEINTOHTML5.INFO
Created On:05-Oct-2011 03:34:16 UTC
Domain: diveintohtml5.net
Registration Date: 2011-10-10
What's the problem? (Score:3)
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.
Bummer (Score:1)
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Access globally... (Score:1)
...back up locally.
Wow. Sucks to not be Mark. (Score:1)
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Dive Into Python critique (Score:1)
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 [oppugn.us]:
"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
Re:Dive Into Python critique (Score:4, Informative)
http://learnpythonthehardway.org/ [learnpytho...ardway.org]
Don't think this is a neutral point of view. Dive into Python tends to come up before Learn Python the Hard Way in most searches, and I think that could have something to do with that opinion.
I've used both, and in my opinion, both have a strong case for existence.
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Having said that, I do think Zed's stuff is better for me as a beginner. But I can't claim to be the same as everyone else.
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Yes, Zed Shaw's stuff is better for a beginner. Particularly a very young one with a severe lack of maturity (but perhaps great bow staff skills.) Why that pipsqueak's juvenile rantings caused Mark Pilgrim such distress is beyond me though.
shows the value of copyleft licenses (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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.
Yes, but once you have no copyright restrictions at all, then no book is even slightly profitable (at least for the author)..
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While GP used the word "Copyleft", I'm suspecting he actually meant to include licenses such as Creative Commons - under which successful (as in profitable for the author) commercial works have been released.
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Yes, but once you have no copyright restrictions at all, then no book is even slightly profitable (at least for the author)..
Two misconceptions here: (1) Copyleft is not the same as having no copyright restrictions at all. Copyleft means using a license such as CC-BY-SA. (2) Copyleft is not incompatible with profit. My own physics textbooks, for example, are copylefted and profitable for me. (I make money from ads on my web site, but other authors of copylefted books have other ways of making a buck.)
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...other authors of copylefted books have other ways of making a buck.)
Hot chicks read my book, and then I make a fortune selling my "genetic material injection service" to them. It pays a lot more than paltry royalties, and it's good fun when they opt for the "direct injection" service, which I offer at half the price of the standard in vitro service.
In all seriousness, if I had it all to do over again, I'd probably choose a copyleft license for my book. You can't make a lot of money with books like this, and once they get tied up in all these contracts and licensing agree
which reminds me... (Score:1)
I'll go download Mendel Cooper's bash programming guide I've used countless times, just in case.
http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/ [tldp.org]
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Thanks for the useful link. It looks very informative and nothing like as large a download as I feared
(Not yet had my third coffee of the day, I assumed tldp stood for "too long; didn't print")