🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <554ctl$j35@hobyah.cc.uq.oz.au>, lucifer@maths.uq.edu.au (David
Conran) wrote:

: It costs money/time/effort to maintain a ftp site, and it is pretty hard
: to charge for it to re-coup money, you can't advertise as well as you can
: on www on ftp :)
: Love and voulenteers soon run out of steam.

Lots of people run ftp sites for all kinds of motivations - anti-cultists
run ftp sites because they want to spread the word about cults.  I don't
think it's likely the problem is lack of volunteers - hell, I'd volunteer
to run a linux ftp site if it would help.

The problem is, the downloaders don't bear the price of transmission and
the cost of maintaining the server when they download.  This was OK when
the Internet was a government-subsidised co-operative network, but doesn't
help now.  
I'm uncomfortable with the idea of throwing open exorbitant tolls and
pay-per-download like the e-commerce people want, but some standard way of
contributing very small amount of money (nanobucks) to offset the costs
when you download would be invaluable and would stop the phenomenon of
Internet databases being victims of their own success.

Some day computers will be mega-cheap and bandwidth will be nearly free
and we won't have this problem - until then, we have to start looking at
ways to sustain the kind of co-operative resource sharing the Internet was
designed for in the new reality of billions of users and huge server
loads.

-- 
Jason Stokes: j.stokes@student.anu.edu.au