Quoting "Georg C. F. Greve" greve@gnu.org:
Or we should find an alternative concept that works out better.
It seems:
THE MAJOR COST is Bandwidth to allow the world's developer community to access the depository.
THE GREATEST RISK is one organization can control the code and the most efficient means of collaboration.
THE TECHNICAL DISADVANTAGE Bandwidth bottle necks between the depository and the developers make downloads very slow and unreliable in many countries/regions. (This is a problem for me in South Africa, and worse in neighbouring countries.)
A possible solution:
There should not be a single depository in a single place. If there are many local depositories (like one in every major city) the demands will be much less on bandwidth per depot and on the long distance connections of the net.
Each program would have its home depository. The records of that development team would then be mirrored by those local depots that recieved requests or wanted to promote each development project.
The FSF (and anybody else) could then produce directories of where to find the home and mirrors of each development project. Each depot could then use these directories to find home depots of the projects it chose to mirror, and point requests for downloads to the nearest/most accessible mirror.
Who would keep all these local depositories? Any body who wanted to, but my first choices would be universities. Who in the universities? Staff/Student Freesoftware Associations would be good. Universities allow a high degree of freedom to their Societies and often provide significant facilities. (Esentially a student computing society is aking to connect its server to the university's network and website.)
What do we need to make this happen? A freesoftware depository management app that's not too dificult to set up, and lots of student Freesoftware societies, or other supporters with significant webspace.
(There are lots of other reasons to set up student freesoftware societies, but this is probably the most significant contribution they could make to the movement as a whole.)
Nick Hockings
s96121272@op.up.ac.za, s96121272@tuks.co.za, nickh@nupedia.com
Who would keep all these local depositories? Any body who wanted to, but my first choices would be universities. Who in the universities? Staff/Student Freesoftware Associations would be good. Universities allow a high degree of freedom to their Societies and often provide significant facilities. (Esentially a student computing society is aking to connect its server to the university's network and website.)
here are two crazy ideas... :)
(1) Use a concept like debian's and gnu's. - have local mirrors; one or more by country run by volunteers, mostly local ISPs and universities.
(2) make a central MD5SUM and file repository that is replicated by loose coupled mirrors using gnutella. - this way you get only MD5SUMs or signatures from a central site, download your files from various gnutella hosts near you and verify afterwards that they are valid.
of course you can also combine both approaches.
I don't know what anyone else would think about that and I wouldn't use it in a commercial setting where I have to guarantee availability and reliability. - but in a free software environment a distributed approach might be the right thing if we can't afford the bandwidth.