find an alternative concept to SF

[Gerhard Poul]

> 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.