The need to reliably preserve our community history

Some of our younger readers may not remember what an important resource Groklaw was during a crucial time in our history. Pamela Jones and those who helped her chronicled the ups and downs of the SCO lawsuit, keeping us all informed of what was going on, digging up information that was useful for the defense, and teaching us all a great deal about how the US legal process works. Groklaw did not stop there, though; it was an irreplaceable source of information on software patents, standards, licensing, and more. It was truly one of the key community resources for many years.

The site was important enough that LWN's history contains over 800 articles and comments with links to almost 700 pages on Groklaw.

Unfortunately, Groklaw has now been taken over by somebody whose priorities differ strongly from those of the site's founder. As of this writing, Groklaw has become a platform for the promotion of crypto products. The text of some original articles remains (though decorated with crypto ads) while other articles have been replaced entirely. An important part of the free-software community's history (and that of the commercial realm around it) has been compromised.

The usual policy at LWN is to not attempt to keep up with link rot. Our history runs back to 1998; if we tried to keep up with all of things we have linked to over those years, we would never have the time to do anything else. But finding ourselves to be hosting hundreds of once-important links that now lead to a crypto scammer's site presents a bit of a special case. We have thus, over the last week, replaced every Groklaw link we could with an equivalent link into the Internet Archive. In the end, there were only a half-dozen links that were not archived.

This episode is an important reminder of what can happen to any Internet resource that we depend on. Web sites will only persist for as long as somebody is willing to care (and pay) for them. Certain governments are currently doing their best to disappear inconvenient information from the net — information that others depend on heavily. An era where everything is digital is an era where important history can disappear at any time and, increasingly, it does.

In this case, the Internet Archive has come to the rescue, proving its value once again. But the Internet Archive is a single point of failure, and one that is under attack at that; it, too, could disappear someday. It is not, by itself, a convincing solution to this problem.

What is a convincing solution is unclear at best. With tools like Git, our community has gotten part of the way there; it is hard to imagine a scenario where we would lose the kernel source or its (Git-era) development history. At least, in any such scenario, building a new kernel would likely appear relatively low on the to-do lists of any survivors. Widespread copying of important data is clearly needed, but we cannot easily do that with the Internet as a whole.

Until we figure this out, we will run an increasing risk of ending up in a situation where the only way to learn something about our history is to ask somebody's generative-AI system and hope that it fabricates something that is remotely plausible. That is not quite the world that we were hoping to build. Our species is currently faced with a number of urgent problems; preserving our history is surely one of them.