As anyone who has been using the Internet for more than 10 years knows, there was once a group of sites where software, mostly freeware, was mirrored, along with the source site of said software. These places were called repositories, and it was thought a good idea, as there was no telling when the link to the originating site might go down.

In the last few years, it has become rare to find sites that are still operating as large mirror sites, as most places that purport to have the software, and show up in Google or Yahoo searches, really do not. These many sites simply point to the originating site, nothing more.

Do we really need this many indexing sites? I don’t think so. Of what good is another index to a site that is down? Also, there have been many freeware programs as of late that have disappeared, simply because the authors wished to push the user into a newer, paid program. This is certainly the author’s prerogative, but when I have a piece of software that proclaims it is being released into the freeware domain, with the proviso that no one decompiles or otherwise tries to copy it, I expect it to be there until the world ends or we move away from x86 chips and Microsoft operating systems entirely.

A case in point is this - I have been looking for the CSV Viewer program from Diamond CS of Australia. It is a small freeware application, very useful for anyone who uses csv files a great deal. It is very small, around 65 kb, if I remember correctly. It is (was) one of those programs that was shown to be freeware. Now I have been trying to get this for about two weeks now, finding every site that shows it stupidly pointing to www.diamondcs.com.au , which appears to be down permanently.  Apparently this little gem escaped the people who run Simtel, the only remaining repository of all the ones I was familiar with.

So there it is - a great little program is (apparently) gone, because either the author decided to remove it, or the company went out of business.

Is this progress? I certainly don’t think so. (This is but one example, I can think of several others, lost or purposely obscured, after being classified as freeware, and put into the public’s hands.

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[tags] repository - mirror sites - redundancy - diamondcs - freeware [/tags]

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