alt Hacker News> But maybe the most underappreciated thing GitHub did was archival work: GitHub became a library. It became an index of a huge part of the software commons because even abandoned projects remained findable.
I think this is a bad thing actually. Having something that's centralized but helpful-99%-of-the-time atrophies our collective archival skills. If everything had to be seeded by someone to keep it alive, everyone would be better at holding on to their copies of the things they really cared about instead of being able to assume they can just check it out again when they want to.
There should be no single place that something can be taken down. When a project on GitHub gets DMCAed it takes everyones' forks with it too. Just look at what happened when Nintendo took down the popular Switch emulators in 2024, where archival/continuation efforts consisted of people figuring out who had the latest revision checked out and sharing it. That was only possible because they were very popular project: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40254602
Aside: I really love the Splatoon-ish header/footer animation on this site! Very unintrusive, adds a lot to the vibe, and also quickly gets out of your way as soon as you scroll down. I'm totally going to rip this off lol
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Archival is easy but copyright and IP law gets in the way. If we removed obstacles to making information accessible, it would lead to less concentration of power.
I don't agree with this. Github has existed for years and one of the reasons developers trust it is that they never monetized their "archival" work yet (TBD with all the new Copilot features).
The alternative would be many sites, each one of them with their own DMCA rules.
What would be the better alternative?
Yeah first thing I do when I come across a repo I like is to clone it. I've seen a few reverse engineering projects disappear before my eyes.
> Having something that's centralized but helpful-99%-of-the-time atrophies our collective archival skills.
Also it feels like "if it's not on GitHub, it doesn't exist", which is a bad thing. Feels like too many developers don't know that code can be stored somewhere else.