The FSF's being stupid again, it seems...

[Rob Landley]

On Thursday 29 June 2006 3:58 pm, Rich Felker wrote:
> > > and through some other unlucky
> > > circumstances nobody else is distributing busybox 1.1.3 anymore. So
> > > if the somebody does not have to distribute busybox 1.1.3 sources
> > > with it's binaries, where would you get it?
> >
> > If _nobody_ is distributing it, I'd presume a nuclear war or comet impact
> > occurred.  Even a sea level rise from global warming probably won't be
> > enough.
>
> You're only thinking of the short-term future. I had a horrible time
> trying to find ancient releases of FreeBSD and ancient GNU binutils
> while doing research on the early evolution of dynamic linking and
> a.out to elf migration. Eventually I did find most of what I wanted
> but it was not at all easy or obvious.

They're only required to keep it for 3 years.  This doesn't help anything.

> These days it's getting even more common for people to delete all but
> the most recent few versions from their ftp sites, and old releases
> being entirely destroyed is a very serious possibility. Your examples
> of movie files and such are not convincing; a lot more people are
> interested in funny/cool movies than source code.

Tell the wayback machine people at www.archive.org.  They're a bunch of 
librarians whose mandate is to archive the internet for posterity.

Rob
-- 
Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.